In a fascinating report today, The Times tells us that bees have a kind of “insect culture” in which they teach each other how to solve puzzles.
The humble bumblebee can learn complex tasks from each other. Professor Lars Chittka, of Queen Mary University of London, is a co-author in this scientific research.
Experiments
The bees took part in two experiments. In the first individual bees were taught how to solve a two-stage problem. Firstly, they had to press a blue lever to release a lock. They could then press a red lever to open a door leading to a sugar water reward.
They had to be trained to follow this sequence by first being rewarded to complete the first step and then the second.
In the second experiment, the scientists introduced new bees which were untrained with the bees that had already been trained to watch the result.
The new bees quickly picked up how to complete the two-stage puzzle in the right order.
This showed for the first time that insects are capable of learning complex multistep tasks by way of social interaction i.e. mutual training.
The professor said:
“Imagine you drop some children on a deserted island. They might with a bit of luck survive, but they would never know how to read or write. Because this requires learning from previous generations, this kind of cumulative acquisition of knowledge was thought to be unique to the human species until now.”
Other forms of animal culture in which learning takes place would be chimpanzees passing down knowledge on how to use tools and humpback whales learning songs from each other.
Bees are special
Alice Bridges who led the study said that the bees stood out because bees had learned from each other how to do a complex task which no single insect had ever done before.
She added that:
“This ability to learn such complex things was thought to be only found in humans. However, with this experiment, we can see that even a bumblebee is able to socially learn something that is too complicated for it to have arrived at by itself.”
