Goal! Ball-Rolling Bees Score Big Science Wins

Though bee brains may appear relatively simple when compared with mammalian brains, the experiments, described in a new study, show that these clever insects are capable of more complex learning than scientists previously suspected. The researchers' previous work with bumblebees showed that they could be trained to pull strings and move levers to get rewards, and that they could learn by watching other bumblebees do it first. "We wanted to explore the behavioral flexibility of bumblebees by testing whether they could use a non-natural object in a task likely never encountered before by any individual in the evolutionary history of bees," Loukola said.