A new study suggests honey bees, like most second graders, can do basic mathematics.
We already know pollinators understand the concept of zero. But this new discovery, led by researchers from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, expands our understanding of how brain size influences brain power.
Smart things come in small packages. And the revelation that even the itty-bitty brain of a bee can grasp addition and subtraction has positive implications for the future of artificial intelligence.
“Our findings suggest that advanced numerical cognition may be found much more widely in nature among non-human animals than previously suspected,” RMIT associate professor Adrian Dyer said in a statement.
“If math doesn’t require a massive brain,” he continued, “there might also be new ways for us to incorporate interactions of both long-term rules and working memory into designs to improve rapid AI learning of new problems.”
The experiment, conducted by RMIT PhD researcher Scarlett Howard, involved training individual honey bees to recognize colors as symbolic representations for arithmetic problems.
Howard constructed a Y-shaped maze, at its entrance a set of one to five shapes—colored blue for addition or yellow for subtraction. After viewing an initial number, the bee would fly through a hole into a “decision chamber,” where it chose to turn right or left.
Each side featured a correct or incorrect solution of plus or minus one, swapped randomly throughout the experiment to avoid the wax makers learning to visit just one sector of the labyrinth.
Initially, the insects made random choices, being rewarded with sugar water or penalized with bitter-tasting quinine solution. It took 100 learning trials and up to seven hours for the critters to learn that blue meant “+1” and yellow meant “-1.”
The ability to do basic math dates back thousands of years, based on evidence that the Egyptians and Babylonians used arithmetic around 2,000 BC.
“These days, we learn as children that a plus symbol means you need to add two or more quantities, while a minus symbol means you subtract,” Howard explained.
“Our findings show that the complex understanding of math symbols as a language is something that many brains can probably achieve, and helps explain how many human cultures independently developed numeracy skills,” she added.
The full study was published this week in the journal Science Advances.
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