We all knew that bees are very busy with honey making etc.!
Are we finally coming to realize that animals are smart in their own ways? The evolution of intelligence across species!
"Studies have shown that some primates count (or rather, organize quantities) from left to right. It’s also been found in fish, rats, birds, dogs, and even ants. But there hasn’t been any research on bees in this area.
Research is increasingly showing that bees are smarter and more complex than we thought. For instance, research has shown that bees can and often do play, exhibit striking cognitive abilities, and even have a grasp of numerical concepts. It’s already been shown that they can count to at least 5 ..."
"... Previous work has shown that honeybees can count, and that they even understand the concept of zero ..."
From the significance and abstract:
"Significance
The ability to judge numbers exists in various vertebrate species but also in honey bees, thus raising the question of the phylogenetic origins of numerosity systems. Here, we studied if bees, like humans, organize numbers spatially from left to right according to their magnitude. As the cultural vs. biological origins of this mental number line (MNL) are a subject of debate, our study provides an important perspective for this discussion. We show that bees order numbers from left to right according to their magnitude and that the location of a number on that line varies with the reference number previously trained. Thus, the MNL is a biological numeric representation that is common to the nervous system with distant evolutionary origins.
Abstract
The “mental number line” (MNL) is a form of spatial numeric representation that associates small and large numbers with the left and right spaces, respectively. This spatio-numeric organization can be found in adult humans and has been related to cultural factors such as writing and reading habits. Yet, both human newborns and birds order numbers consistently with an MNL, thus raising the question of whether culture is a main explanation for MNL. Here, we explored the numeric sense of honey bees and show that after being trained to associate numbers with a sucrose reward, they order numbers not previously experienced from left to right according to their magnitude. Importantly, the location of a number on that scale varies with the reference number previously trained and does not depend on low-level cues present on numeric stimuli. We provide a series of neural explanations for this effect based on the extensive knowledge accumulated on the neural underpinnings of visual processing in honey bees and conclude that the MNL is a form of numeric representation that is evolutionarily conserved across nervous systems endowed with a sense of number, irrespective of their neural complexity."
Honeybees order numbers from left to right, a study claims The finding suggests that mental number lines are innate, not learned. But the idea has critics
Fig. 1
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