Hannah Nordhaus in National Geographic:
Over the past few decades, scientists have been learning more and more about the ways that bees figure things out. They’ve studied how honeybee foragers fan out across miles of unfamiliar terrain in their six-week adult lifespan, navigating by sunlight and memory as they visit thousands of flowers to retrieve nectar for their colonies. They’ve followed bees back to their nests and seen how they dance to tell others where the best flowers are, and how they make collective decisions to swarm and relocate their homes.
Now researchers are uncovering remarkable new insights into how these industrious insects think. The breakthroughs have arrived thanks to a series of creative experiments designed to test how bees perceive the world, solve problems, and respond to unexpected situations. And the results have found that a single bee is much smarter than almost anyone imagined. These tiny creatures can make the sort of intelligent decisions that scientists previously believed were possible only in vertebrates.
More here.
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