Honeybees use a 'mental number line' to keep track of things

Bob Yirka is a research scientist at Phys.org.

A small team of researchers with members from the University of Toulouse, the University of Lausanne, and the University of Padova discovered that honeybees have a mental number line in their brains. The group described their experiments with honeybees in their paper.

Scientists believe that baby chickens have a mental number line. The brain processes numbers in a left-to-right way. When asked to sort a bunch of grapes by the number, most people do it from the left to the right. The researchers wondered if honeybees could use a mental number line. They did a two stage experiment to find out.

A group of honeybees were taught to associate a number with a sugar water reward using blocks taped to a wall inside of a cardboard box. They made sure the bees didn't associate a reward with different shapes. The second part of the experiment was conducted after the bees had learned their associations.

Two panels were set up inside of the box. The panels were set so that you could read left to right or vice-versa. The researchers watched to see which panel they would choose to find the bees' reward.

The bees were trained on the number one and chose a panel on the right. The bees were trained to choose between the "five" panel on the left and the "three" panel on the right. The bees used a mental number line to keep track of the numbers. They think that the idea of keeping track of numbers using a mental number line is common in many animals.

More information: Martin Giurfa et al, An insect brain organizes numbers on a left-to-right mental number line, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2203584119 Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

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