True Facts: Bees That Can Do Math!

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Learn to think.

If you've ever seen a bee, you've probably noticed that

they're not the largest of animals

and thusly are endowed with a brain suitable for their smallness-ness.

Here it is, the brain of a bee.

I mean, honestly, it looks fairly large on the screen like that,

but this Xbox controller, which is apparently what controls a bee,

only has around 960,000 neurons in it.

Compare that to the hundred billion or so neurons in the human brain.

You see that right there?

No? Well, that's the bee brain to scale.

Anyway, with stats

like that, you might expect a bee to suck at Scrabble, which they do,

but they can remember the directions to a flower a mile away.

I'm not sure I could do that.

And they can learn which flowers have the good sauce.

This bee right here, for example, learned that those yellow third

grade arts-and-crafts flowers had the better nectar to drink

while the blue ones had the better pollen to rub all over.

It’s the best day of that pipe cleaner’s life.

I know what you're thinking: Big deal.

Learning to tell flowers apart is like the main business of being a bee.

Of course, they're going to toss a couple

hundred thousand neurons at something important like that.

But what about if things get a bit more complicated?

See this puck? Well, in the middle of this, there's a pit with some sugar

juice in it and bees, they love the sugar juice.

Now, of course,

if you put a cap over top that sugar juice, you get some bummed out bees.

But if you take that cap and cover just a little bit of that food hole,

and then each time the bee comes back, you cover it up a little bit more

until it's totally covered.

You get some bees that maybe complain on Yelp about the restaurant going to sh**.

But also bees that gradually figure out that you can push that cap out the way.

And once you light that fire, some of them really get into the pushing.

All right, Millie, you did it.

You can stop now. Pretty clever, these bees.

But if you train them on a different shape cap

and then present them with both kinds of caps,

they'll push the shape they were trained on first.

Regardless of which one is covering up the sugar hole.

So they're learning, but they're not quite getting the full picture.

But pushing things out the way is pretty normal for a bee.

Flowers like that of the black locust don't just give up the pollen.

You have to force it open.

So what about learning something new that doesn't involve pushing?

Here, you have some “flowers.”

I'm doing air quotes.

They've got a hole in the middle with sugar in it,

and the whole thing is under a clear cover.

But there's a string attached that you can pull to get at it.

Now, you give this setup to a bunch of bumblebees, and not much happens.

And a lot of buzzing around.

I mean, might be because the flowers looked like crap

didn't even drop petals on them.

I know it's scientists. Didn't have the balls to go to art school, but still.

Anyway, you might find a rare bee the one in 100

sort of thing that can figure this thing out on the first go.

But, you know, those kind of bees: getting drunk the night before the SAT sort of bees.

But most of the rest of us, sorry, them need a little help.

But what you can do is train them by gradually pushing the flower

under the cover.

And that way they learn to pull on the string to get the juice.

Not bad.

Right?

And listen, once they learn it, they’re champs at it. I mean you want to give them a job.

But look at this.

You take another bee that doesn't know how to do it.

Put that bee in a box and let it watch the train bee pull the string?

Now, let that be out the box.

And you know what it friggin learned by watching.

Now the trained bee can still do some things that this one can't.

Like, if you add extra strings so the flower doesn't move right away.

The trained bee keeps pulling until it works.

The one who learned by watching just kind of gives up.

So some things aren't getting across, but in this way

they can teach each other some very complex things.

Here's a bee

trained to do a two step puzzle where you only get the reward at the end.

And again, another bee can learn just by watching.

Looks like a bit of an annoying student, gets right up in there.

Now he's gone for a vape.

All right, I'm back. Blue thing, red thing. Got it.

I know what you're thinking. What about balls?

Listen, what you've heard is true.

Bees love balls. Like before...

I even show you stuff about how smart they are,

you should know that bees really love balls.

If you make a clear path from a bee’s nest to food, nothing in the way.

But to get there, the bees have to walk past

what is essentially a bee sized Chuck-E-Cheese ball pit,

they stop and they play with those freaking balls.

Not for some reward or anything like that.

They play with balls.

So it's not surprising that you can train a bee to play one round of mini golf

and look at how they train them with a little bee puppet on a stick.

And when they put the ball in the middle, they get a sugar snack

and they eventually get the hang of it.

Look at this one.

She throws it

so hard, she does a somersault and she's like, “Come on, it hit the middle.”

“Where's my sugar?” Anyway, now you have the trained

bee teach a novice bee how to put the ball in the hole.

But this time you have three balls and the two closest ones are glued down.

So it has to use the farthest one.

Now you let the novice bee try it on its own and you don't glue down

any of the balls.

And you know what?

It uses the ball that was closest to the middle.

The one that gets to the treat the fastest.

Even though it was trained on a different ball.

That's innovation.

Now, this allows knowledge to spread through an entire colony.

Bees teaching other bees.

That's what this shows, how that string pulling skill from

before went from A to B to B to B.

If you like this show and you like to learn like the bee,

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Check out Brilliant today. Where were we?

Oh right. It makes sense that

bees can share knowledge.

I mean, bees are social butterflies.

I mean, they're bees, but they all live together

and they have to have some complicated roommate meetings.

Like, who's going to get the groceries

or in this example, how to choose the location of a new home.

Now, out of 10,000 bees or so, only a couple hundred of them are the Scouts.

And the Scouts go off and look for a good location, maybe a nice hole.

And if they find something, they come back with directions.

But they don't blab about it.

They do it through interpretive dance.

It's like if a mime had to give directions to the porta potty at Coachella.

Here's how it works.

They do this sort of figure eight thing, right?

And when they go through the center, they shake their a**.

This already packs in a bunch of info.

It's like the Morse code of twerking. The direction they move in

while they shake it corresponds to the direction of the location.

Check it out. They're doing this on a vertical surface.

The up direction means straight towards the sun.

Down is away from the sun.

So this direction here is like 5:00, away from the sun.

Now the distance to the location is how long they shake it.

It's roughly a thousand meters for every second of shaking.

Apparently, they bought into the metric system.

Now, you might be thinking how the hell do these bees

know how far they flew?

Well, at one point

they thought the bees were measuring the energy that they used to get there.

So they put tiny weights on the bees to see if it changed their estimates.

And you know what?

It mainly proved you shouldn't put weights on bees.

Now there's a bunch of bees with muscular calves walking around.

Another time

they put these tents up as landmarks on the way from a hive to a feeder.

And then they

changed the number of landmarks which seem to confuse some of the bees.

So what now?

Bees can count? Well it seems they can, especially in lower numbers.

Here's one avoiding four and landing on two.

Here's one

they taught to tell the difference between 11 and 12.

You can give them two scenarios

and train them to pick the larger one or the smaller one in this scenario.

Look at it. Go back and forth, just to be sure.

Perfectionist bee.

And if you train it on picking the larger number,

it won't just pick the one with more shapes.

It'll also pick one with the same number of shapes.

But where the shapes themselves are bigger.

It's like the concept of larger. And look at this.

If you train them to pick the smaller thing,

they recognize that nothing is smaller than something.

I mean, that's the concept of zero.

In this one, if the bee sees yellow shapes, it's trained to go inside

and look for the panel with one less than the number of shapes outside.

Freaking subtraction.

If the color of the shapes is blue, the bee knows to add one to the number.

I mean, they can do math.

You probably only knew about their spelling. Kill me.

But discreet counting doesn't seem to be the thing that helps them judge distances.

Instead, they seem to use something called optical flow,

which is kind of like the rate that things go by in your visual field.

And if you know that

this is how bees measure things, you can kind of screw with them.

You put them in a tunnel, for example, with stripes on the floor.

As it passes over the stripes, it measures the distance

and has an appropriate a** shaking.

Now you do the same thing, except in this one, the stripes are moving.

So as the bee flies, it thinks it's covering a hell of a lot more ground.

And it tells its buddies about a location that's miles away.

Meanwhile, you put a horizontal stripe and nothing changes while you fly over it.

They don't know how far they went.

And this explains, by the way,

why bees will often drown if they fly over still water.

You can see this effect by using a mirror, too.

The bee keeps getting closer to the ground to try and discern some movement,

but all there is is a reflection of a stationary bee.

So you can see it keeps bumping into the ground.

Anyway, in addition to distance and direction,

there's one more thing that seems to be communicated in this dance.

The bees estimate of how good the location is that it's found

seems to be related to how often it does the dance in a row.

If it thinks it's found something great, it just keeps going.

And then there’s bees like this one - that don’t seem very enthused.

It flew like three feet and found a shoe.

Now, the reason for going on and on about a good location

is because the bees eventually have to pick one location for their new home.

So these dances aren't just about the directions, it's about marketing.

If you found a good location, you try and convince other scouts to check it out

and then dance like you do until there's enough to make the decision.

And listen, since you've stayed around this long, I'll tell you one other thing.

All of this communication about distance and location and quality

mainly happen inside a hive in the dark.

Mic drop. A tiny little bee

Mic drop.

You think the bee likes the honey?

No, no, no.

Bees love balls.

Can’t tempt a bee with your money.

No, no, no, no.