Bumblebees Have Collective Intelligence; Insects Can Teach Others to Retrieve Sugary Treat [Study]

Bumblebees have a human-like collective intelligence. If one learns a skill, it can reportedly teach the others to do the same.

Bumblebees Have Human-Like Collective Intelligence

Bees have tiny brains. However, they are reportedly intelligent. A new study shows that these insects can learn from each other.

According to behavioral scientist Alice Bridges from Queen Mary University of London and colleagues, to test this, bumblebee colonies were kept in a two-step puzzle for 36 or 72 hours over 12 or 24 consecutive days without the assistance of humans.

After all that time, the bees could not figure out how to get the sweet prize. It's as though bumblebees spent up to a third of their lifetime—roughly eight days—devoted to foraging over their career—equivalent to working on the problem.

The setup includes a plastic lid covering a yellow circle that holds a sugar drop. Bees can access the blue tab by pushing the red tab once the blue tab has been pulled out of the way.

The bees needed a human to guide them carefully, which could only be done in exchange for an additional incentive. However, if one bee figured out how to move the two tabs to get the sweet treat, they could educate the others, too.

For example, the well-known "honey waggle dance" of bees, which indicates the location, orientation, and quality of food sources, was formerly believed to be entirely instinctual but is now partially influenced by social factors.

Additionally, in 2017, bumblebees were taught to roll a ball into a goal in order to receive a reward. The insects needed to correct each other's mistakes and learn from one another to score, and they did.

According to Alex Thornton, an ecologist at the University of Exeter, the study argues that among the "scrapheap" of theories explaining human cognition and culture, the capacity to learn from others what one cannot learn alone should now be grouped with tool usage, episodic memory (the capacity to remember specific previous experiences), and deliberate communication.

ALSO READ: Unlike Honeybees, Solitary Bees are Born with Functional Internal Clock, Study Finds

Bumblebees Cannot Taste Pesticides

However, while bumblebees are smart, they can't reportedly smell insecticides, so they are prone to consuming contaminated nectar.

The researchers used two methods to determine whether bees could taste neonicotinoid and sulfoximine pesticides in nectar that resembled oilseed rape (Brassica napus). First, they used electrophysiology to record the responses of neurons in taste sensilla, or "tastebuds," on the mouthparts of the bumblebee. This allowed scientists to track the frequency of "fires" in the neurons and, in turn, the intensity of the taste response.

The researchers also looked at the bumblebees' feeding behaviors, giving them either pure sugar solutions or sugar solutions laced with pesticides.

The results demonstrated that whether the bees drank sugar solution or pesticides containing sugar, the neurons' responses were the same. This implies that bumblebee mouthparts cannot be identified and cannot avoid common pesticides present in nectar.

Research on pesticide use on outdoor crops is essential because bees are susceptible to ingesting poisons and won't stop doing so. The study's principal author, Dr. Rachel Parkinson of the Department of Biology at the University of Oxford, said that these findings might be used to find a non-toxic material that repels bees and can be put on pesticide-treated crops that don't need pollination.