Media release

From: The Royal Society

Non-numerical strategies used by bees to solve numerical cognition tasks

The ability to use numbers is a powerful cognitive capacity for humans. There has been enormous interest in discovering if and how other animals might solve number problems. New work shows that honey bees, and possibly other animals, might be “cheating” on their math tests. Honeybees solved a task widely used to test numerical abilities, but without using number information. In a shortcut, they estimated quantities using simpler visual cues. This work shows how good animals are at finding the most effective way to solve a problem, and it may be quite different to how we would solve it.

B+ student – Honeybees and other animals may have been ‘cheating’ in their maths tests. In this study, honeybees solved a task often used to test numerical abilities, but used simpler visual cues rather than number information. ‘Animals are good at finding the most effective way to solve a problem - it may be quite different to how we would solve it - requiring increased vigilance and cleverness from the experimenter’, the authors said.