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Nº 102 · Nature · 45 sec

Bees understand that nothing is less than one

Researchers taught honey bees "less than". Then they showed them a blank card – and the bees placed it correctly.

A honey bee sits on a purple aster with a yellow centre
Photo: John Severns (Severnjc) · Public domain · Original

School for bees

A team from Australia and France trained individual honey bees on "greater than" or "less than". To do so, it showed them cards with one to six symbols. It was already known that bees in flight can count up to four things they pass one after another.

Your guess

Then the "less than" bees saw a blank card. What did they do?

In good company

With this understanding of zero, bees are on a par with African grey parrots, monkeys and even preschool children, the team wrote in Science in 2018. And that with a bee's tiny brain.

Plus and minus

In 2019 bees even learned to calculate: one of the colours blue and yellow stood for "add one", the other for "take one away". Flying freely, they used this to solve problems they hadn't seen before. Humans and bees are separated by over 400 million years of evolution.

Fits with this

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