(image credit: by Pixabay )
Bees aren’t just honey-makers—they’re surprisingly smart, too. In groundbreaking studies, researchers found that bees can count, understand the concept of zero, and even solve simple math problems. It’s time we give these tiny insects credit where it’s due: they’re not just busy—they’re brilliant.
Buzz-Worthy Brains: The Unexpected Intelligence of Bees
When you think of animals doing math, you probably picture dolphins or chimpanzees—not insects. But science says otherwise. Despite their tiny brains (roughly the size of a sesame seed), bees are capable of performing basic arithmetic and understanding abstract concepts.
That’s right—bees can count, add, subtract, and even recognize zero. For an insect with only about 960,000 neurons (compared to our 86 billion), that’s an astonishing mental feat.
How Bees Learn to Do Math
In a landmark 2019 study published in the journal Science Advances, researchers trained honeybees to perform arithmetic using a system of visual symbols. Here’s how it worked:
Bees were presented with a sample image containing a set number of shapes (like circles or triangles).
They were trained to associate blue shapes with addition and yellow shapes with subtraction.
After viewing the initial sample, bees had to fly through a maze and choose between two possible answers to the math problem.
Amazingly, the bees chose the correct answer about 70% of the time. That’s a success rate well above random chance, and enough to demonstrate they weren’t just guessing—they were learning.
The Zero Discovery: Why It’s a Big Deal
Bees also join a short list of species—including monkeys and parrots—that seem to grasp the concept of zero. In another experiment, bees were shown images with different quantities of shapes and were asked to choose the “least number.” Time and again, they correctly identified an empty image (zero shapes) as representing the smallest quantity.
This ability to recognize “nothing” as a numerical value is a major cognitive milestone. In fact, even human children typically don’t understand zero until around age four. For bees to comprehend this is not only impressive—it reshapes how we think about animal intelligence altogether.
Why This Matters: Rethinking the Insect Mind
These discoveries challenge long-held assumptions that insects are simple or purely instinct-driven. Instead, bees are proving to be:
Capable of symbolic learning
Able to generalize concepts across different situations
Adaptable problem-solvers with memory and recall
It also opens up intriguing questions: If bees can do math, what else can they do? And what about other insects we’ve overlooked?
