Can bees recognise human faces?

What the research found

In experiments where bees were rewarded with sugar for approaching one face image and not another, they learned the discrimination and retained it for days. Follow-up work suggested they treat a face as a configuration of features — two eyes above a nose above a mouth — in a way loosely analogous to configural processing in humans, rather than recognising individuals as such.

The finding is best understood as being about visual pattern learning rather than about faces. Bees have to learn and remember complex flower patterns to forage efficiently, and human faces are simply another complex pattern that the same machinery can be trained on.

What it does not show

What bees genuinely are good at

• Learning and remembering flower colours, shapes, scents and patterns, including ultraviolet markings we cannot see.
• Learning routes and landmarks well enough to navigate several kilometres and return to a specific hive.
• Learning to handle complex flowers better with practice — bumblebees measurably improve at flowers that require manipulation.
• Counting or estimating small numbers of landmarks, and learning abstract concepts such as 'same' and 'different' in laboratory tasks.