Bees can be trained to score goals for food, say researchers
MIAMI: Entice them with a sweet reward and bumblebees can be trained to roll a ball into a goal, revealing unexpectedly complex learning abilities for an insect, researchers said.
The findings in the US journal Science Thursday offer the first evidence that bees can learn a skill that is not directly related to their typical duties of foraging for food.
Even more, bumblebees appeared to learn best by watching the behaviour of other bees, and sometimes even improved on their predecessors’ techniques.
Until now, the ability to learn how to solve a complex problem by reaching a goal was known to be possible in humans, primates, marine mammals and birds.
But insects were not necessarily considered part of this elite group.
“Our study puts the final nail in the coffin of the idea that small brains constrain insects to have limited behavioural flexibility and only simple learning abilities,” said co-author Lars Chittka, a professor at Queen Mary University of London’s School of Biological and Chemical Sciences.
Previous studies have shown bees could learn to pull on a string to get a food reward and perform other simple tricks, but these studies were limited in scope because the “learning processes involved might be used in tasks encountered by bees naturally,” said the study.
Bumblebees appear to learn best by watching the behaviour of other bees. — AP
Researchers wanted to explore whether or not bees could learn to manipulate an object – in this case a small, yellow ball – unlike anything they knew in their daily lives.
“We wanted to explore the cognitive limits of bumblebees by testing whether they could use a non-natural object in a task likely never encountered before by any individual in the evolutionary history of bees,” said joint lead author Clint Perry, also of the QMUL School of Biological and Chemical Sciences. — AFP