Bilingual Bees that Count

Another Amazing Finding about the Threatened Honeybee

Researchers at Zhejiang University in China and the Australian National University have discovered two new cognitive abilities of the humble honeybee.  They’re apparently able to both count and interpret new languages with a brain about the size of a grain of sand.

Is it me, or is he just adorable? Photo by Rob Flynn Courtesy of the USDA

If anyone needed another reason to love an insect that both produces honey and fertilizes crops, this latest discovery will surely impress even the most apiphobic (afraid of bees or bee stings) among us.

Songkun Su at Zhejiang University in China and Shaowu Zhang at the Australian National University cultivated a mixed-species colony of European and Asian honeybees, and despite the differences in the famous waggle-dance that relays information about food sources to other members of the colony, the bees of both species were able to successfully interpret the foreign dialect to find the targeted food source.   

Marie Dacke and Mandyam V. Srinvasen, both at Australian National University, trained European honeybees to pass a set number of stripes inside a tunnel to find food placed by a marker.  Even when the food was removed, the bees continued to seek out the correct stripe. 

To further understand the bee’s intellect and to ensure a counting function was being observed, the researchers changed the spacing of the stripes and used different types of indicators.  The bees continued to pass the correct number of cues to find the food reward.

This is just the latest finding of many skills exhibited by honeybees.  Bees are capable of both associative learning and cognitive mapping that allows them to adapt to changing circumstances and make choices based upon previous experiences.  They also have a highly sophisticated ability to work out a complex division of labor scheme in hives with as many as 100,000 inhabitants.

Yet all is not well in the bee world, because no explanation has yet been found for Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has been thinning out honeybee numbers and threatening a human crisis in coming years.  The disorder is characterized by a sudden abandonment of a beehive with no explanation for the bees departure and presumed death.  The bees just disappear, and it’s happening by the millions all across the United States.

CCD is an enormous issue for farmers everywhere, because bees play a crucial role in crop production as pollinators.  Without bees, crop yields will decline precipitously.

Bee populations have been under stress since the 1980’s, but CCD has only been an issue since the winter of 2006.  There are many theories about the root of the problem ranging from global warming to pesticides and parasitic mites, but none have been proven conclusively.  Others believe it may be a combination of several factors.

The only certain thing is the importance of finding an answer to CCD, because bees are integral members of our ecosystem.  The experiments in Australia prove the insect can count to at least four, but if their own numbers ever drop that low, humanity will have a very serious problem on its hands.

This report was made possible in part by contributions from Live Science.com citing articles in the journals PLoS One and Animal Cognition.