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  • Writer's pictureGrant Sheffer

Bees can do math

While monkeys or rats may be the common answer to the question: “what is a good subject for an experiment”, bees may not be one of your first few things brought to mind. Though containing less than 1 million neurons, bees are a great subject in the neuroscience field of study. Bees are smart insects, smart enough to be able to do complex problems and understand what 0 means. In this test, RMIT University used worker bees and some sugar water as a reward.

When a bee notices that an area has a lot of food for their hive, they’ll go back until it’s almost or all gone. This is where the sugar water comes into play. When a worker bee came across the experiment in a field, the seamless supply of sugar water was a goldmine for food. This is what got their subjects to keep returning. When a bee got a correct answer, they received a generous amount of sugar water, but if not, they got quinine, an anti-parasite used in the treatment of malaria.

When the bees approached the decision chamber, they had to remember two simple things: subtraction was yellow and addition meant adding. When they got in, they had two options: an option with a value of one more or less than the answer and the correct answer. For the first few tests, bees kept randomly choosing answers until they could associate the answers with the colors. With over 100 tests done, the scientists got the average answer to be 64-72% of the time. Now why is this complex? This is because it requires two levels of processing. In such a tiny brain, it seemed impossible for quite a long time it would even be possible.

Humans of course can understand math easily but we can’t reach the levels of artificial intelligence understand math easily. With this quite big breakthrough in the neuroscience community, people have quickly tried to tie it to artificial intelligence and other smaller animals. What the neuroscience community does with this information is up to them, but I can tell you that this advancement in understanding has opened a lot of third eyes as to how quickly anything can learn.

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