Honey Bee Is Smart
Honey Bee Is Smart
Honey Bee Is Smart
Unlike most insects, the honey bee is a social animal, which forces it to have many intelligent abilities that non-social insects (like, say, flies, or beetles) don’t need. And its smarts are legion: the insects are able to recognize and distinguish between human faces, a surprising trait given that it isn’t really necessary for their survival. Another one: bees can count. In an experiment, honey bees were rewarded for stopping at the third in a series of landmarks, and proved able to remember this location and to thus count. (The distance was altered, while keeping the same number of landmarks, to discourage the bees from using their sense of distance.) Further study indicated their maximum counting abilities go to about four.
Bees are capable of observation, learning, and memory to solve problems. Every bee is entirely flower-native at the beginning of its foraging career, meaning that the bee has no instinctive knowledge about how to score nectar or pollen from flowers. That’s trouble, because flowers are wildly divergent: different flowers will need entirely different strategies to exploit, and it’s up to each individual bee to figure out how to attack each different flower.
Bees can learn new strategies for getting food from other bees, something few other insects are capable of doing. This is called robbing, in which bees figure out that it can be easier to go to another hive to suck out the nectar / honey stores rather than figuring out how to get inside the flower. Other bees have proven able to observe this strategy, understand its purpose, master it themselves, and remember it for future flowers. That’s pretty smart!
But perhaps the best-known and most insane bit of intelligence from bees is what’s known as the “waggle dance.” This is a method of communication that the bee uses to tell other bees in the hive the location of a flower or source of food. Here’s how it works: a bee performs the dance on a vertical surface inside the hive. The dance is shaped like a coffee bean: roughly, an oval with a line down the middle. Dancing straight up means to fly in the direction of the sun, straight down means away from the sun, and left and right mean to fly to the left or the right of the sun.
The bee travels in a figure-eight pattern, tracing the line in the middle before performing the loops around the outside of the coffee bean shape. The amount of time it takes the bee to make its circuit around the outside of the coffee bean tells other bees how far away the food source is: a one-second loop means, roughly, that the food source is a mile away. The longer the loop, the farther away the food source is.
The bee will repeat this dance many times to indicate the quality of the food source: a really great one will find the bee doing this over and over again, yelling “IT’S A MILE NORTHWEST OF HERE, IT’S A MILE NORTHWEST OF HERE, IT’S A MILE NORTHWEST OF HERE” for minutes on end. A decent but not quite as good source might find the bee repeating the message only a few times.
The honey bee dance is unique insomuch as they’re using symbols. No other animal besides humans has that. Even other primates don’t use symbols: an ape like a chimpanzee may point at a desired object, or lead others to it, but it won’t use an abstract symbol or message to indicate what it wants to convey. The honey bee’s waggle dance is a wildly intelligent attribute; it enables a bee to very efficiently convey detailed information to a large group, and also can be done in the safety of the hive, where other animals can’t overhear.
These behaviors are far above and beyond what most people would assume an insect is capable of. Without exaggerating, the honey bee is capable of advanced symbolic communication, language, facial recognition, number use, observation understanding of rules, and high-level problem-solving. They are, in some senses, significantly smarter than many mammals. Amazing.
Best Arizona Honey by these amazing Honey Bees.