There’s an adage about teaching old dogs new tricks, but Clint Perry and other researchers at Queen Mary University of London wanted to know more about animal intelligence.
They worked with bumblebees, which have 100,000 times fewer neurons than humans do, to see if the bumblebees could learn to roll a ball. They started by building a platform with a porous ball in the center. When a bee went up to the ball, it could access sugar water.
Then, they moved the ball to the edge of the platform, this time without any sugar water as a reward. The bees had to figure out that they needed to move the ball to the center from the edge. Researchers demonstrated this with a plastic bee at the end of a stick, and the bees completed the task.
According to Perry, this suggests that bees, which are important crop pollinators, could in time adapt to new food sources if their environment changed.
“They’re just more behaviorally flexible than people generally thought an insect could be,” Dorothy Fragaszy, a comparative psychologist at UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences who studies tool use in primates, told NPR’s Morning Edition.
