Bees are born with an innate ability to remember flowers

Geelong: We’ve all watched a honeybee fly past us and land on a nearby flower. But, how does she know what she’s looking for? And when she leaves the hive for the first time, how does she even know what a flower looks like? A paper, published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, set out […]

Geelong: We’ve all watched a honeybee fly past us and land on a nearby flower. But, how does she know what she’s looking for? And when she leaves the hive for the first time, how does she even know what a flower looks like? A paper, published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, set out to discover whether bees have an innate “flower template” in their minds, which allows them to know exactly what they are looking for even if they’ve never seen a flower before.

Bees’ reliance on flower resources such as nectar and pollen has led them to be effective learners of flower signals. They must be able to tell which flowers in their environment will provide a reward and which will not. If they didn’t know the difference, they would waste time searching for nectar in the wrong flowers.

Honeybee brains are tiny. They weigh less than a milligram and contain just 960,000 neurons (compared to 86 billion in human brains). Their learning extends to many cognitively challenging tasks, including maze navigation, size discrimination, counting, quantity discrimination and even simple math!

Two groups of bees were prompted to discriminate between sets of flower images. One group was raised in a hive inside a greenhouse with no flowers, and had therefore never been exposed to flowers.The second group consisted of experienced foragers which had encountered many flowers in their lives.

The researchers trained both groups to discriminate between images of two flowers found in nature, using a reward of sugar water for choosing the correct option when directed. The results reveal flower-naive bees have an innate flower template that aids them with learning new flowers and discriminating between them.