Can bees use tools?
Short answerIt dependsEmerging research
Bumblebees can be trained to move a ball to a target for a sugar reward, and they improve on the technique they were shown rather than copying it. Whether that counts as tool use depends on the definition — the ball is not being used on anything else — and the species is Bombus terrestris, not the honey bee.
Where the belief comes from
The 2017 study was reported almost everywhere as bees playing football, which is a memorable image and a poor description. The bees were moving an object to a location for food, under training, in a laboratory arena.
What the experiment showed
Bees learned the task from a demonstration — a model bee moved by a magnet, another bee, or simply seeing the ball move on its own — and the ones that watched a live demonstrator learned best. When given a choice of balls at different distances they went for the nearest, which is not what they had been shown, so they were not copying a sequence but solving the problem.
The two things regularly got wrong
- The species. This is bumblebee work. Reporting it as a honey bee ability is the single commonest error in coverage of bee cognition, and it happens because bumblebees are the practical choice for arena experiments.
- The framing. Moving a ball to a goal for food is not football, and whether an object moved for its own sake counts as a tool is a definitional question that the experiment does not settle.
Sources
- Bumblebees show cognitive flexibility by improving on an observed complex behavior — Science (2017) · Peer-reviewed article
- Do bumble bees play? — Animal Behaviour (2022) · 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.