“This design assessed whether bees could solve the task without continuous perceptual feedback,” the authors wrote. All told, 16 of 22 bees succeed in this task. Granted, the bees could still potentially catch a glimpse of the flower once the ball was near the opening, so the team repeated the experiment with three openings in the barrier to further limit visual feedback. This time, there were no significant differences in performance between trained and untrained (control group) bees.
In one last experiment, Loukola et al. sought to isolate the bees’ goal-directed performance from accidental success and from visual feedback cues. This time, the testing apparatus featured a rectangular arena with two compartments, both invisible to the bees. During pretraining, 30 bees were shown the flower positioned above one of those compartments. For the actual test, the flower was not visible from the ball’s starting location, and the bees had to move the ball into the correct compartment. The results: 23 of the 30 bees succeeded at the task, and 16 of the successful 23 bees did so without first moving the ball to the incorrect compartment.
The team acknowledged that the experimental setups had no way to track the bees’ gaze, posture, or other behavioral cues that might have let them pinpoint the precise “Eureka!” moment when the bees “understood” the problem. Further experiments should test how well bees grasp causal relationships. “Nonetheless, the present design provides the clearest evidence to date that bumblebees are capable of generating novel, goal-directed solutions, establishing a foundation for future studies to further investigate the cognitive processes underlying insight in insects,” the authors concluded.
Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.ady1618 (About DOIs).
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