The power pollinators can make multiple quick decisions with a brain smaller than a sesame seed.
, the team trained 20 bees to recognize five different colored “flower disks.” The blue flowers always had a sugar syrup, while the green flowers always had tonic water that tasted bitter to the bees. The other colors sometimes had glucose. Then, the team introduced each bee to a makeshift garden where the flowers only had distilled water. Each bee was filmed and the team watched over 40 hours of footage, tracking the path the insects took and timing how long it took for them to make a decision.
“If the bees were confident that a flower would have food, then they quickly decided to land on it, taking an average of 0.6 seconds,” HaDi MaBouDi, co-author and computational neuroethologist from the University of Sheffield in England,“If they were confident that a flower would not have food, they made a decision just as quickly.”
If the bees were unsure, they took significantly more time–1.4 seconds on average–and the time reflected the probability that a flower contained some food. Next, the team built a computer model that aimed to replicate the bees’ decision-making process. They noticed that the structure looked similar to the physical layout of a
. They found that the bees’ brains could make complex autonomous decision making with minimal neural circuits.“Now we know how bees make such smart decisions, we are studying how they are so fast at gathering and sampling information.
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