Bumblebees can solve problems on their own, research has found

“This design tested whether the bees could complete the task without continuous feedback,” the authors wrote. All told, 16 out of 22 bees succeeded in the task. Of course, the bees could see the flower just before the ball was launched, so the team repeated the experiment with three gaps to distract them. At this time, there was no significant difference between trained and untrained bees (control group).

In a final experiment, Loukola et al. He tried to separate the bees’ sign by directly working well by accident and the photos commenting on wealth. Meanwhile, the experimental equipment consisted of a rectangular enclosure with two rooms, both of which were invisible to the bees. In preparation, 30 bees were shown a flower on top of one of the chambers. In the actual experiment, the flower was not visible from where the ball started, and the bees had to move the ball into the correct room. The results: 23 out of 30 bees succeeded in the task, and 16 out of 23 successful bees did it without moving the ball to the wrong place.

The team admitted that the experiments had no way of determining the appearance, posture, or other characteristics of the bees that would allow them to pronounce the true “Eureka”! the moment when the bees “understood” the problem. Further experiments should test how well bees handle causal relationships. “However, this design provides the clearest evidence to date that bumblebees are capable of generating new, goal-directed responses, laying the groundwork for future studies to further explore insect-derived cognitive processes,” the authors concluded.

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.ady1618 (About DOIs).