Elaine Yang | February 19th, 2025

Honeybees, already known for their impressive teamwork and navigation skills, have shown that they are capable of basic math too. In a recent study, researchers trained bees to navigate a maze where they encountered shapes in either blue or yellow. Blue indicated they needed to add one, while yellow meant subtract one. After several trials — and rewards for correct answers — the bees learned to consistently solve these problems, even when faced with new challenges.

What makes this discovery so fascinating is the scale of their achievement. Bees have incredibly small brains, yet they demonstrate cognitive abilities we often associate with more complex animals. This finding sheds light on how numerical understanding can evolve in unexpected ways and suggests that even seemingly simple creatures might have surprising mental capabilities. Humans and bees are separated by more than 600 million years of evolution, but the fact that we share this ability to do math has the implication that nonhuman animals are more capable of understanding numerical cognition than we originally thought.

References

Dyer, A. G., Garcia, J. E., Howard, S. R., Weber, A. A., & Greentree, A. D. (2019). Common principles in learning from bees through to humans. Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy, 4(2), 184–201. https://doi.org/10.1163/23644583-00401014

Howard, S. R., Avarguès-Weber, A., Garcia, J. E., Greentree, A. D., & Dyer, A. G. (2019). Numerical Cognition in honeybees enables addition and subtraction. Science Advances, 5(2). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aav0961

RMIT University. “Bees can do basic arithmetic.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 6 February 2019. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190206200358.htm