Honeybees get a buzz from basic mathematics

Two bees or not two bees? That is a question the insects seem to be remarkably well equipped to answer.

Honeybees have demonstrated a grasp of basic mathematics, including a concept of zero as a number, that puts them on a par with chimpanzees, four-year-old children and an African grey parrot called Alex.

The feat is all the more striking given that the honeybee is an animal of very little brain. Its central nervous system contains fewer than a million neurons, compared with 86 billion in humans.

‘‘The impressive thing about the bees was they could understand that zero was at the lower end of a number continuum, which is equivalent to the highest level of understanding zero that has been observed in any non-human animal,’’ Adrian Dyer, a vision researcher at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, said. ‘‘The capacity the bees demonstrate for understanding zero is equivalent to our understanding of how young children can learn to represent zero, which becomes a foundation of our maths and technology-based society.’’

The idea of nothing may sound fairly obvious. Really, though, it has meaning on several levels: there is nothing as opposed to something, zero as a point on a line of numbers, and zero as a digit for use in sums such as 10x4.

Humans only reached the third of these stages in around the third century AD, despite the sophisticated mathematical systems of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Mesopotamians.

The study, published in marks a great leap forward for insectkind. While there is evidence that some kinds of spider may be able to count, the honeybees displayed a capacity for numerical reasoning on a far higher level.

Dr Dyer and his colleagues began by training their honeybees to distinguish between smaller and larger quantities of black circles and squares on a white background. If they got the puzzle right, they were given a hit of sugar water. If they got it wrong, they were sprayed with bitter quinine. Eventually the bees reached an accuracy rate between 70 and 75 per cent, much better than chance. Then came the tricky part: a choice between a white rectangle with one shape on it, and a rectangle with none on. They passed the test 63 per cent of the time.

The achievement puts them in the same league as apes, dolphins and the brightest birds. Alex the parrot, an academic prodigy who died in 2007, learnt to count jelly beans and coloured wooden blocks. –