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6th May 2022
02:57pm BST
Via UnSplash[/caption]
One group of bees was trained to believe that landing on even-numbered cards would warrant a sugar water reward whereas those that landed on odd numbered cards would instead get quinine, a bitter-tasting compound. The other group in the study was taught the exact opposite.
Scientists soon found that bees chose the correct answer 80 per cent of the time however by incorporating cards with 11 or 12 images, the accuracy of the bees dropped to 70 per cent.
“We show that free-flying honeybees can visually acquire the capacity to differentiate between odd and even quantities of 1–10 geometric elements and extrapolate this categorization to the novel numerosities of 11 and 12, revealing that such categorization is accessible to a comparatively simple system,” the team explained.
Via UnSplash
Within their study they added: “A large and complex human brain consisting of 86 billion neurons, and a miniature insect brain with about 960,000 neurons, could both categorise numbers by parity."
To further explore the breakthrough, scientists then created an artificial brain model with five neurons. They found that the model could pinpoint odd or even numbers with 100 per cent accuracy, which the experts say proves that parity tasks do not require a complex brain as first thought.
More research is now required to better understand the complexities of bee learning.
