Honeybees and the Big Math Buzz

When we think of the number zero, it’s a little bit hard. Quantities of everything we have in our life come in one or above, so zero, being just nothingness, is hard. We have the ability to comprehend nothingness, but it has always thought to have been a more advanced concept…unless you’re a honeybee. In recent years, we’ve learned through science that other animals besides ourselves have developed an understanding of zero; nothingness. Several other birds and primates, like orangutans and the African grey parrot can distinguish the difference between “none” and “something.” And, well, scientists now believe this extends to honeybees. Welcome to the nothingness math club, honeybees!

Most people know that honeybees are pretty smart, efficient and certainly needed for most of earth’s eco systems. Honeybees are the world’s most important pollinator of food crops. Despite that there are other insects, birds and bats that also pollinate, it’s estimated that one third of the food we eat every day is produced because of and relies on the pollination of mostly bees. Honeybees also play a significant role in the pollination of crops we use for other non-food products, like beeswax that’s used in beauty and cleaning products or cotton, flax and hemp which are used for textiles. As a result of their importance, honeybees have been studied quite a bit. Previous studies have revealed that honeybees have the intellect to count and prefer quantities up to four, which is pretty remarkable for a species that has a lot less neurons in their brains than any other animal with similar counting skills. However, a massive study conducted by scientists at RMIT University of Melbourne Australia has proved that the buzzing little pollinators can discriminate a value of larger numbers from zero, but also one from zero. That’s pretty darn smart! 

How did they discover this, you might ask?  First, researchers made cards with varying amounts of symbols. Second, they set up little pods of sugar water that sat behind the card with the least amount of symbols on it. Bees use their antennae to detect odors. Their sense of smell is so sensitive that it can detect the trace of scents while in flight and from far distances. This is what helps bees effectively locate pollen-rich flowers. This sense of smell is the reason they’re always buzzing around flowers, fruit and sometimes your food. Setting sugar water behind the one card with the least amount of symbols was then meant to set up temptation to attract the bees. Because sugar water was behind the card with the least amount of symbols, they always flew to that card. Makes sense, right? Well then, the researchers presented the bees with another set of cards. One of the cards had nothing on it and other one had one or more symbols, but this time, they took away the sugar water, so the honeybees were not just When presented with these, the bees consistently continued to fly to the cards with nothing on them, despite that there wasn’t sugar water behind them anymore. The bees knew what the card with nothing on it looked like and could distinguish between that and the cards with one, two, three, four and five symbols on them.

What’s pretty incredible about this is that bees have such a smaller brain with fewer neurons than humans. Bees have fewer than 1 million neurons vs. humans who have about 86,000 million. Yet, we both understand nothing. This could prove that numerical competence and we’ll say fluency, for humans, is extremely valuable and important for animals in terms of their ability to navigate, reproduce, exploit food sources, avoid death circumstances and socialize.

So how do honeybees with such fewer neurons than us understand such a hard mathematical concept? It’s not 100% understood yet, but there is belief through studies that there might be a group of neurons known as “number neurons.” Through studies done on primates besides ourselves and some bird species, scientists are finding that these specific cells respond in different ways depending on the number of factors presented. While our brains are wired to have neurons that process certain stimuli (i.e. think of the way sound stimulus makes our auditory neurons work) the concept of nothing and why some species can understand it is possibly just as important. Identifying how our brains and those of other species of animals comprehend “nothing” as a numerical value could help us better explain our place in the world.