The concept of zero – less than one, nothing, nothing – is deceptively complex. The first zero place dates back to around 300 BCE, and the idea did not make its way to western Europe until the 12th century. It gets kids to preschool to wrap their brains around the idea. But scientists in Australia have recently discovered a new animal that was able to understand zero: the honey bee. A study in 2018 finds that the insecticides can be taught as a concept with nothing.
A few other animals will understand zero, according to a current study. Dolphins, parrots, and monkeys understand the difference between something and nothing, but honey bees are the first proven insects that can do it.
The 2018 study, published in the journal Science, discovering that honey bees can rate grades based on “greater than” and “less than,” and realize that nothing is less than one.
The researchers trained bees to identify images in the laboratory that showed the least number of elements (in this case, dots). If they chose the image with the smallest circles from a set, they got sweet water, but if they chose another image, they would get a sour bucket.
As soon as the insects got that concept down, the researchers introduced another challenge: The bees had to choose between a blank image and one with dots on it. More than 60 percent of the time, the insects were able to successfully excrete if they had to choose the smallest dots between an image with few dots and an image with no dots at all, dots were not the correct answer . They could grasp the notion that nothing can yet be a numerical quantity.
No wonder the bees are capable of such information tricks. We already know that they can count, teach each other skills, communicate through the “waggle dance,” and think abstractly. This is just more evidence that bees are incredibly intelligent creatures, despite the fact that their insect brains look nothing like ours.
Considering how far apart bees and primroses are on the evolutionary tree, and how different their brains are from us – they have less than 1 million neurons, and there are about 86 billion of us – this finding raises many new questions about the neural basis of understanding numbers, and no doubt further research will come into how the brain processes concepts as zero.