Researchers constructed a maze to assess bees’ capacity to discriminate between long and short light flashes. Alex Davidson/Queen Mary University
As reported by CNN
Studies have shown that bees can process the duration of light flickers and use this information to determine where to fly for food.
According to PhD student Alex Davidson and his supervisor, Elizabeth Versace, a senior lecturer in psychology at Queen Mary University of London, these are the first evidence of such a capability among insects. The discovery could help settle the long-running debate among scientists about whether insects can recognize complex patterns, Versace explained.
As part of the experiment, the team built a maze through which the bees, as they left their hive to forage, had to obtain food.
Researchers presented the bees with two visual cues: a circle that flashed briefly, and a circle with a longer flash.
Approaching the corresponding circles, the bees found a sweet food in one circle, and a bitter-tasting one, which they dislike, in the other.
The circles were placed in different positions in each chamber of the maze, but over time the bees learned to fly toward the circle with the shorter flash, linked to the sweet food.
Experimental findings
Next, the researchers tested the bees’ behavior in the absence of food to rule out vision or smell as decisive factors.
It turned out that bees are able to distinguish circles by the duration of the flashes, and not by other features.
“And thus we show that the bee truly processes the time difference between them to guide its choice during foraging.”
“They can use a novel stimulus they’ve not seen before to solve tasks in a flexible way.”
“I think it’s truly impressive.”
Scientists note that bees are among a few animals, including humans and some vertebrates, that can distinguish short and long flashes – ranging from 0.5 to five seconds.
For example, this ability helps people decipher Morse code, where a short flash corresponds to the letter “E” and a long one to “T”.
Although it remains unclear how exactly bees gauge the duration of time, the team plans to explore the neural mechanisms that enable these insects to determine time.
Additionally, researchers want to repeat the study with bees moving in colonies rather than individually, and explore cognitive differences among individuals in how quickly they estimate duration.
Davidson hopes the results help people understand that bees and other insects are not merely “machines that act on instinct,” but are complex living beings with inner lives and unique experiences.
“Not only do they have a complex cognitive apparatus, this flexibility in learning, memory, and behavior,” he added.
Versace emphasized that such a discovery could help society view bees not only as mindless pollinators but as creatures with multifaceted thinking.
“They are not just machines we need,” she said.
Results also shed light on our own understanding of time. “This is such a fundamental part of our lives and the lives of all animals, but we still do not fully understand what time is and how it works in our minds,” Davidson noted.
“I find this study very interesting because it shows that this is not solely a human question.”
The study was published in Biology Letters.
According to Cintia Akemi Oy, a research fellow at the Center for Biodiversity and Environment Research at University College London, the finding demonstrates “a contemporary understanding of time” in bees. Oy was not involved in the new study.
“This finding makes sense because bees must carefully manage their time while foraging to maximize rewards and minimize the costs of returning to the nest”
“Such an approach shows how generalized learning can be achieved by brains that are comparatively small in scale to birds and mammals”
