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Can bees count?

Bee scienceReviewed 2026-08-09

Short answerIt dependsEmerging research

Bees can be trained to choose between small numbers of shapes above chance, typically up to about four, with performance falling as the quantities grow and converge. Whether they are tracking number, or something that correlates with it such as total area or edge length, is exactly what is being argued — and counting, in the sense the word usually carries, has not been shown.

Where the belief comes from

A run of striking papers between 2018 and 2019 on quantity, zero and arithmetic, reported in the press as counting and doing sums. The underlying discriminations are real; the words attached to them belong to a different claim.

What the experiments do

A bee flies into a chamber and meets two cards carrying different numbers of shapes. One is rewarded with sugar, the other with plain water or with quinine, which bees dislike. After training the bee is tested on new cards it has never seen. Choosing correctly on novel cards is what separates learning a rule from memorising two pictures.

The control problem

Cards that differ in number also differ in total area, total edge length, density and spatial frequency unless the experimenter works hard to make them not. A bee tracking total edge length would produce much the same choices as a bee tracking number. Good designs vary those properties independently, and the results survive some of that control. Whether they survive all of it is a live and legitimate argument.

What bees plainly do estimate

  • How much nectar a patch is returning, which sets how vigorously a forager dances.
  • The volume of a candidate nest cavity, measured by walking around inside it.
  • Quorum size at a nest site, judged by how often a scout meets another scout there.

None of that is counting either, and all of it matters more to a bee than a card with four dots on it.

The claims behind this answer

Emerging research

Real studies exist and point somewhere, but they are small, in vitro, in animals, or not yet replicated. Direction is not the same as a result.

Emerging research

Bees discriminate between small numbers of visual elements above chance.

Replicated across laboratories for small quantities, with the accuracy pattern expected of approximate magnitude estimation rather than counting.

What this does not claim: It does not establish counting, a number concept, or that number rather than a correlated visual property is the cue the bee is using.

  • Numerical ordering of zero in honey bees — Science (2018) · Peer-reviewed article
  • The Mind of a Bee — Princeton University Press (2022) · Monograph

Sources

  • Numerical ordering of zero in honey bees — Science (2018) · Peer-reviewed article
  • The Mind of a Bee — Princeton University Press (2022) · Monograph
  • Honeybee Democracy — Princeton University Press (2010) · Monograph

How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.

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