Bees Means Minds?

This was intended to be a PoSWW. Except for a little over-egged newspaper stuff, however, it turned out to not be stupid. But, there was no way that title was gonna go unused, and so here we are.

There are many stories on various animals’ ability to “count” and the like. Crows feature commonly in these stories, but there are many other creatures.* There is always a question, typically unaddressed, about what the animal is actually doing, what sense of number or arithmetic is being exhibited. A recent contribution to the telling was an Age article, titled,

Scientists in a buzz over discovery that bees can understand numbers

The headline use of “understand” was a flag, and the report did not begin well:

European honeybees can “count” numbers up to six and understand the concepts of zero and “greater than” and “less than”, according to new international research led by Monash University.

The Age article improved after this shaky beginning, however, and the research being reported upon seems very interesting.

There is a whole subfield of research in “animal cognition”, with researchers trying to nail down animal’s sense of number, without the fun but distorting anthropomorphising common to popular tellings. Within this research world, there is apparently an active debate on honeybees and the extent and manner to which bees are perceiving number. The report of an experiment on this question was just published by The Royal Society, titled

Stimuli that fit: a biology-aligned approach to numerical cognition research

The experimenters included Scarlett Howard, a biologist based at Monash University (and also Andrew Greentree, a physicist based at RMIT). It was a florid Monash media release that was picked up by The Age.

The scientists’ experiment is narrow and technical, in the way that most such experiments must be, and there is plenty we did not grasp or try to grasp. The scientists’ report is very well written, however, and the basic purpose and nature of the research is pretty easy to understand.**

These animal cognition guys make a fundamental distinction between what they refer to as “quantity discrimination” and “numerosity discrimination”. This is obviously a very confusing pair of terms for an outsider, but, in brief, the former refers more to estimation of number, possibly employing physical-geometric cues, while the latter refers to a clearer recognition of (low) number. The question is, then, whether bees are estimators or more precise counters. There have been duelling experiments, suggesting one or the other, with the jagged figures on the right used in a recent experiment suggesting bees were more estimators.

The motivation for the current experiment was the hypothesis that these jagged figures were not sufficiently bee-friendly, not taking sufficiently full account of “the bees’ perceptual capabilities”. The framing of the experiment was then based upon very technical arguments of viewing angles, the resolution limits of bees’ vision and so forth. The experimenters came down on the side of bees engaging in numerosity discrimination.

There is no way an outsider can easily evaluate the research, so God knows who is right and what bees are really doing. But it was genuinely interesting to (semi)read about the research. And, most importantly, we got to use our title.

To close, because why not, here is Loudon Wainwright III’s bee song.

*) The funniest story of animal “intelligence”, even if not really a number thing, is Calvin Trillin’s repeated telling of the chicken beating his friends at noughts and crosses.

**) One can compare the authors’ evident concern for comprehensibility to the word jungles typical in education research. The less one has to say, the longer the words one needs to say it.