{"id":62318,"date":"2018-06-12T13:43:17","date_gmt":"2018-06-12T17:43:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/modernfarmer.com\/?p=62318"},"modified":"2018-10-18T19:02:42","modified_gmt":"2018-10-18T23:02:42","slug":"honeybees-are-very-smart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/modernfarmer.com\/2018\/06\/honeybees-are-very-smart\/","title":{"rendered":"Honeybees Are Very Smart"},"content":{"rendered":"

Animal cognition research tends to focus on human behaviors, partly because that’s interesting to us humans, and partly because it’s easier to understand. (Some abilities we don’t have – magnetic field sensing, echolocation, that kind of thing – don’t necessarily read to us as signs of intelligence.) Because of that, animals that are very different from us, like most non-mammals, typically don’t score that highly when their smarts are tested. But bees, weirdly, do. And new research from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT)<\/a> shows that bees are smarter – however we choose to define it – than we even thought.<\/p>\n

Honeybees demonstrate lots of behaviors that scan as “intelligent” to humans<\/a>, including many that are unusual or highly advanced for any animal, let alone insects. They have symbolic language in what’s known as the “waggle dance,” a symbolic movement that conveys the distance, direction, and quality of nectar sources. They can observe and mimic behaviors. And they have demonstrated advanced abilities in numeracy (meaning they seem to understand numbers).<\/p>\n