Thursday, 6 June 2019

apis and bombus

Via Slashdot, we learn that the same Australian-French collaborative team of researchers that determined that honeybees understand the concept of zero, can recognise human faces and perform basic arithmetic also can understand numerals as stand-ins to symbolise numerical values.
Separate studies suggest that bumblebees (which also live in nests and hives as colonies with a queen and division of labour—albeit on a much smaller scale) are capable of a similar level of communication and learning, they just don’t dance like their more agile cousins, a fact that sounds funny given that they’ve garnered the reputation of being too heavy to fly, which they manage quite well on the contrary. Insights into how smaller brains process such abstractions are not only humbling and point to the eusocial insects and their cohesion as drivers of culture but could moreover led to new and innovative ways to mimic Nature with artificial intelligence.