Can bees learn abstract concepts?
Short answerMostly trueEmerging research
Yes, in a specific and well-tested sense. Bees trained on relations such as sameness, difference or above-and-below apply the rule to stimuli they have never seen, and in some designs across sensory modalities. It is the strongest result in insect cognition and much less famous than the counting work.
What was done
In a delayed matching-to-sample design, a bee sees a sample at the entrance to a maze and is rewarded for choosing the matching option further in. Once trained, she is tested with samples and options she has never encountered — different colours, different patterns, in some experiments a scent as the sample and a colour as the option.
Bees transfer the rule. That rules out memorisation: there is nothing to remember about a stimulus seen for the first time, so what has been learned is the relation rather than the items.
Two concepts at once
A later experiment trained bees on a spatial relation and on sameness simultaneously, and they applied both to novel stimuli. Holding two abstract rules and deploying the right one is a considerably stronger result than holding either alone.
Sources
- The concepts of 'sameness' and 'difference' in an insect — Nature (2001) · Peer-reviewed article
- Simultaneous mastering of two abstract concepts by the miniature brain of bees — Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2012) · Peer-reviewed article
- The Mind of a Bee — Princeton University Press (2022) · Monograph
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.