Conducted by researchers at Queen Mary University of London, the study showed that more than 80 percent of the bees reliably chose the correct flash pattern even when there was no reward involved. The experiment sheds new light on the cognitive potential of invertebrates, whose brains are typically dismissed as too simple for this kind of processing.
Bees are not naturally exposed to flashing visual stimuli. Yet this experiment proves they can not only notice such patterns but also learn to associate them with specific outcomes. With fewer than one million neurons packed into a brain the size of a sesame seed, the bees’ success challenges conventional ideas about the relationship between brain size and learning capacity.
The Setup: Flash Patterns and a Sweet Reward
To test the insects’ ability to distinguish time-based stimuli, the researchers designed a simple experiment. Bees were introduced into a chamber containing two flashing light circles—one with quick pulses, the other with slower ones. According to Alex Davidson, lead author of the study and doctoral student at Queen Mary University, the team wanted to find out whether bees could “learn the difference between different durations.”
Beneath one of the lights was a sugar solution, which bees are attracted to. The other was paired with a drop of quinine, a bitter compound they avoid. Once the bees learned which flash pattern led to sugar, the researchers removed the reward and presented only water under both lights. Despite the absence of sugar, most bees continued to choose the light associated with the original reward, showing they had retained the learned association.
Davidson described the results as “exciting“, in a statement, noting that bees typically never encounter flashing light in the wild. That they could grasp and remember such abstract timing patterns shows a kind of temporal processing ability that had not previously been attributed to insects.
Time Perception With a Miniature Brain
One of the most intriguing aspects of this discovery is the simplicity of the bees’ neural architecture. Compared to the 86 billion neurons in a human brain, bumblebees operate with fewer than one million. Still, they were able to perform a task that researchers assumed required a more complex system.
According to co-author Elisabetta Versace, a senior lecturer in psychology at Queen Mary, the findings offer “evidence of a complex task solution using minimal neural substrate.” She suggested this could inspire more efficient designs in artificial intelligence, particularly in neural networks that must operate with limited computational resources, repots IFL Science.
The experiment also strengthens the idea that cognitive traits once thought to be exclusive to vertebrates might in fact be more widespread. The ability to judge time intervals is critical for many animal behaviors, including navigation, communication, and threat detection. In this light, the bees’ performance may reflect a more general evolutionary strategy among species to process time-based information.
Unexplained Talent Raises New Questions
Despite the clear results, the researchers are unsure why bees have this ability. Davidson noted that the capacity to perceive and encode duration might be a basic feature of how neurons function, rather than an evolved adaptation to a specific environmental challenge.
Versace echoed this idea, suggesting the behavior could be a byproduct of other cognitive functions like movement tracking or intra-species communication, which often rely on precise timing. She emphasized the need for a broader comparative approach to examine how time perception has evolved across different animal groups.