What would it mean if bees could understand the concept of nothing?
That would be something.
Yet that is what scientists reported June 7 in the journal Science. Bees had already demonstrated they could count. Now, the researchers wrote, bees have shown that they understand the absence of things -- shapes on a display, in this experiment -- as a quantity: none or zero.
This is a big leap. Some past civilizations had trouble with the idea of zero. And the only nonhuman animals so far to pass the kind of test bees did are primates and one bird. Not one species, one bird, the famed African gray parrot Alex.
The bee study was clever. Scarlett Howard and Adrian Dyer of RMIT University in Melbourne trained bees to land on visual displays for a reward.
Some were rewarded if they landed on the displays with more shapes, like squares or circles, and some if they landed on the displays with fewer. The shapes were of different sizes and the displays with varying numbers of shapes were hung on a wheel in different places to avoid giving any spatial clues.
Then, the researchers introduced a display with no shapes. Bees trained to land on a display with fewer shapes landed on the so-called empty set, the nothing display, the zero card. Bees trained to land on the display with more shapes did not.
Furthermore, bees did better when the empty display was in a group with displays with larger numbers of shapes than with fewer. And that suggested the bees get the idea of more and fewer, of a numerical series in which one is closer to zero than five.
"I certainly wouldn't use the word consciousness," in relation to bees, Dyer said. But "the evidence is consistent with high-level cognitive abilities."
ActiveStyle on 06/25/2018