HONEY BEES IN THE WORLD OF MATH

1. animals who also understand the concept of zero

1.1. A parrot has grasped the concept of zero, Alex, a 28-year-old African gray parrot who lives in a lab at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, has a brain the size of a walnut. But when confronted with no items on a tray where usually there are some, he says "none."

1.2. A 2003 study in the journal Nature, for example, found that common marsh birds called coots can recognize and count their own eggs, even when other eggs are in the nest.

1.3. Some animal intelligence is hauntingly familiar, like the male monkeys that pay to see female monkey bottoms. And studies show that monkeys, dogs and rats all know how to laugh. a monkey can understand the concept better than a 4 year old child.

2. Bees are incredible thinkers!

2.1. It’s possible that bees are just oddly smart compared to other insects, but Dyer suspects his results suggest “probably a much broader spectrum of animals can process” the idea of zero. Though it would take individually training and testing different species of animals to prove this hunch.

2.2. they have shown bees are capable of an amazingly complex array of tasks. For instance, they found in 2010 that bees can be trained to learn and remember human faces, and they do it in a manner that’s not entirely different from the way we do it.

2.3. What is nothing?” Dyer explains, is a question that “seems a bit simple to us. But the actual ability to do it took a long time to arrive in human culture. And so it’s not straightforward, so understanding how a brain [a bee brain, a human brain, etc.] does it is exciting.”

3. How to teach a bee the concept of zero?

3.1. Researchers train bees like they train many animals: with food. “You have a drop of sucrose associated with a color or a shape, and they will learn to reliably go back to” that color or shape.

3.2. Bees are fantastic learners. They spend hours foraging for nectar in among flowers, can remember where the juiciest flowers are, and even have a form of communication (called a waggle dance) to inform their hive mates of where food is to be found.

3.3. they put out a series of sheets of paper that had differing numbers of objects printed on them. Using sugar as a reward, the researchers taught the bees to always fly to the sheet that had the fewest objects printed on it.

4. Australian scientists taught bees the concept of zero something human children struggle with.

4.1. By demonstrating that even tiny brains can comprehend complex, abstract concepts, the surprise finding opens possibilities for new, simpler approaches to developing Artificial Intelligence.

4.2. "Large brains are thus not necessary to play with numbers. This capacity is therefore probably shared by many other animals." What we haven't known -- until now -- is whether insects can also understand zero

4.3. Scientists have discovered honeybees can understand the concept of zero, putting them in an elite club of clever animals that can grasp the abstract mathematical notion of nothing.