A thousand secrets of bees

• Bees have incredible individual and collective intelligence
• In particular, they know how to “dance” to indicate sources of pollen.
• Studies also show that they can count up to 5

Bees and pollinators in general are essential to human life. They help produce about a third of the food we eat, and their contribution to the global economy is estimated at around $577 billion annually. However, we know very little about these remarkably intelligent insects. Let’s take advantage of this article to break down some amazing facts about bees.

Amazing individual intelligence

In an article posted on the site ConversationStephen Buchmann, a researcher at the University of Arizona, explains that bees are sentient beings that are capable of feeling pain, remembering patterns and smells, or even recognizing human faces. Another surprising note: they can solve mazes or even use simple gadgets in the course of experiments conducted with a sweet reward.

They will also be self-aware. While it sleeps, bees consolidate their daily memories, all in a tiny brain with a million neurons.

Extraordinary collective intelligence

While some bees live in isolation, honey bees cannot live without their colony. The latter is equipped of collective intelligence Extraordinary and far superior to the addition of individual intelligences.

For example, bees fan together to cool the hive or group together to warm it up and maintain the right temperature (35 degrees) for larval development and thus ensure colony population. Likewise, the colony is united to resist as a whole and to fight off some harmful predators such as the Asian hornet.

When bees get information through a ‘dance’

In 1967, the Austrian ethnologist, Carl von Frisch, was awarded the Nobel Prize after his startling discovery. Bees engage in a dance to signal to their counterparts where the pollen is. The man discovered that the bee was pointing in the direction of the source relative to the sun and that the more or less pronounced torsion of its abdomen provided information on distance.

Bees know how to count to 5

Science has already proven that bees can count to 5. Even Toulouse researcher Martin Giurfa and his team have managed to go even further.

These insects, like humans, seem to have a numerical mental line that allows them to align quantities from left to right in ascending order. Invertebrates can also have a spatial representation of numbers.Our colleagues conclude From Toulouse News.