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They can defeat just about any attempts to block them from feasting on bird feeders and thrive in the biggest, toughest cities in North America. These creatures have figured out how to use people for their own benefit, and have even, extremely rarely for animals, been documented exhibiting deceptive behavior.

Prepare to consider squirrels in a whole new light.

"Sometimes I think that squirrels are North America's version of monkeys," says Steve Sullivan, curator of urban ecology for the Chicago Academy of Sciences and Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum as well as the head of Project Squirrel, a citizen science project that tracks the various species of squirrels. But just how smart are they, really?

The squirrel family is a big and varied one, including ground squirrels like prairie dogs and marmots (giant beaver-like squirrels that mostly live in alpine environments). Most Americans know the tree squirrel, the many and very widespread species of rodent with puffy tails, fantastically acrobatic movements, phenomenal adaptability to urban environments, and very cute little faces. There are a whole bunch of species and subspecies of squirrels in North America, but the most common are the eastern grey squirrel and the fox squirrel, both of which started out in the eastern third of the continent but are now found coast to coast.

The eastern grey and fox squirrels are widely studied; earlier this summer a big conference, the 7th International Colloquium on Arboreal Squirrels, was held in Helsinki, Finland. Studies routinely come out that discover new, amazing behaviors, especially involving the squirrel's signature behavior, that it buries caches of its food for later. One experiment found that they'll try multiple tactics to open a locked box. Another found that squirrels really do remember the location of their caches, that they aren't merely using their keen noses to locate them. Another found that they're able to quickly learn from their peers.

And perhaps most interestingly, a 2010 study found that squirrels actually engage in deceptive, or paranoid, behavior. When squirrels are being watched, they'll construct fake caches, pretending to bury a nut, going through the whole rigamarole of digging a hole, patting it down with their front teeth, and scraping dirt or grass over the top of it. They'll actually be concealing the nut in a pocket near their armpit, and will make the real cache somewhere else. Even when you're watching for it, it can be hard to tell when a squirrel is making a fake or a real cache. So, how smart is that?

The first big wrench in that question is the word "smart." Animal intelligence is something we humans are fascinated with, whether it's teaching the dog a new trick or marveling at the social behavior of octopuses. Animal intelligence stories make headlines constantly. Yet, it's still not well understood. "We kind of interpret that as, how would they do on the same IQ test that my 7-year-old just took?" says Sullivan. "And the answer to that is, 100 percent of every other species would do pathetically on it. But that doesn't mean your kid can climb a tree as fast as a squirrel can, or can observe a hawk and identify its characteristics as quickly as a squirrel can."

Intelligence, among squirrel experts, is not a particularly useful or meaningful concept. When we humans discuss intelligence, we could be referring to a whole host of not-always-related topics: problem solving, abstract thought, creativity, memory retention. A 2006 paper found a whopping 71 different definitions of intelligence scattered amongst scientific literature.

Tests for animal intelligence usually involve problem solving and memory: can a rat remember a route through a maze? Can a crow figure out how to use a bent piece of wire to fetch food? But those are tests that we conceive of because, frankly, they're tests that we'd do well on. "Humans are very visual, so we assume that's how animals solve problems, by using what they see in the world," says Mikel Maria Delgado, a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley who studies the university campus's population of fox squirrels. "But we know that other animals have much better senses of hearing, senses of smell, touch, sensation, like animals with whiskers, and humans can't do a lot of those things very well so we don't consider that criteria for being intelligent."

It's easy to assume squirrels aren't smart because they can't, say, use tools to bury nuts. Like a lot of assumptions about what makes an organism intelligent, that assumes that intelligence is equal to how similar an animal's cognitive process is to ours. But what if we go the other way around, and play by the squirrel's rules?

Delgado conducted a study in which students were placed in a competitive game to act like squirrels. They were tasked with hiding caches of plastic eggs, and then 15 minutes later tasked to go back out and bring back as many eggs as possible. They could locate their own caches or steal from those of other students, the same way squirrels do. This is a very squirrel-like test: memory, deception, location, observation, paranoia.

So how did the students do? "People are pretty bad at it," laughs Delgado. "It really gives people an appreciation for the problems that squirrels are solving." Most couldn't remember their own hiding places. Squirrels bury about 10,000 nuts per year, and the most populous species, the eastern grey and the fox squirrel, make many, many different caches, and may not uncover them for months. They may dig up a cache and bury it somewhere else, and do that up to five times. And squirrels, unlike UC Berkeley students, are engaged in this intellectually draining activity while also avoiding predators and braving the elements.

A major obstacle to coming to a measurement of animal intelligence is that animals don't really have very much leisure time in the wild; decisions are made in the name of efficiency, making sure the amount of calories burned is fewer than the amount of calories ingested. "All animals have evolved to solve certain problems and they're usually really good at that," says Delgado. But those problems aren't necessarily the ones we'd pick if giving an intelligence test. "You're only as smart as your ecology requires you to be," says Sullivan.

A major element to the perceived intelligence of squirrels is their ability to live and even thrive in urban environments. This is sort of an element of the basic human understanding of intelligence as "similarity to us," but there might be something to it. After all, doesn't the ability to adapt to a fast-growing, extremely unnatural construction like a city demonstrate intelligence for an animal that hasn't evolved to live in that environment?

Not necessarily. "They're really sort of pre-adapted to urban areas," says Sullivan. "A telephone line is, to them, no different than a sassafras tree. A telephone line and a sassafras tree both have long spindly branches that poke out, that you can run across to get to safety. But they don't offer food or much in the way of safety." It's not so much, suggests Sullivan, that squirrels adapted to urban life, but that the skills and abilities squirrels already had just so happened to be a good fit for cities. It's the same story for pigeons. Urban pigeons are typically feral descendants of domesticated rock pigeons, a bird species that prefers to live and nest on small ledges on the sides of cliffs. They prefer tiny, hard outcroppings on steep vertical environments. So when we built skyscrapers with ledges, it wasn't that pigeons adapted to cities-it was like we built a gigantic perfect mansion, just for them.

Socialization is often cited as a building block of intelligence. Squirrel social behavior is not really that unusual in a lot of ways. Unlike their ground squirrel cousins, tree squirrels like the eastern grey and the fox squirrel are solitary, living alone, raising young only briefly, and communicating in a range of vocalizations and body movements. (That chittering sound you hear from above, by the way, means "you're close to my food cache, get the hell out of here.") The only really unusual attribute thus far discovered is the squirrel's ability and propensity to deceive other squirrels. But is that a sign of intelligence or simply an element of instinct? Very hard to say.

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Is A Squirrel Smarter Than A Fifth-Grader?

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They can defeat just about any attempts to block them from feasting on bird feeders and thrive in the biggest, toughest cities in North America. These creatures have figured out how to use people for their own benefit, and have even, extremely rarely for animals, been documented exhibiting deceptive behavior.

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One day in 2010, while taking a stroll in his backyard, Kandula the elephant smelled something scrumptious. The scent pulled his attention skyward. There, seemingly suspended in the air, was a sprig of bamboo decorated with bits of cantaloupe and honeydew. Stretching out his trunk, he managed to get the fruit and break off a piece of the branch, but the rest of the tasty leaves remained tantalizingly out of reach. Without hesitation he marched straight to a large plastic cube in the yard, rolled it just beneath the hovering bamboo and used it as a step stool to pull the whole branch to the ground. Seven-year-old Kandula had never before interacted with a cube in this manner. Determined to satisfy his stomach and his curiosity, he did something scientists did not know elephants could do: he had an aha moment.

A couple weeks earlier a team of researchers led by Diana Reiss and Preston Foerder, then at City University New York, had visited Kandula's home at the National Zoo in Washington D.C. They placed sticks and sturdy cubes around the yard and strung a kind of pulley system similar to a laundry line between the roof of the elephant house and a tree. From the cable they dangled fruit-tipped bamboo branches of various lengths both within and without of Kandula's reach. After preparing the aerial snacks they retreated out of sight, turned on a camera and waited to see what the young elephant would do. It took several days for Kandula to achieve his initial insight, but after that he repeatedly positioned and stood on the cube to wrap his trunk around food wherever the scientists suspended it; he learned to do the same with a tractor tire; and he even figured out how to stack giant butcher blocks to extend his reach.

Other elephants had failed similar tests in the past. As it turns out, however, those earlier studies were not so much a failure of the elephant mind as the human one. Unlike people and chimpanzees, elephants rely far more on their exquisite senses of smell and touch than on their relatively poor vision, especially when it comes to food. Previously, researchers had offered elephants only sticks as potential tools to reach dangling or distant treats-a strategy at which chimps excel. But picking up a stick blunts an elephant's sense of smell and prevents the animal from feeling and manipulating the desired morsel with the tip of its dexterous trunk. Asking an elephant to reach for a piece of food with a stick is like asking a blindfolded man to locate and open a door with his ear. "We are always looking at animals through our human lens-it's hard not to," Reiss says. "But now we have an increased appreciation of diverse thinking creatures all around us because of so much research on so many species. It's fascinating to try and find ways of testing animal minds so they can show us what they are really capable of."

People have been telling legends of elephant memory and intelligence for thousands of years and scientists have carefully catalogued astounding examples of elephant cleverness in the wild for many decades. In the past 10 years, however, researchers have realized that elephants are even smarter than they thought. As few as eight years ago there were almost no carefully controlled experiments showing that elephants could match chimpanzees and other brainiacs of the animal kingdom in tool use, self-awareness and tests of problem-solving. Because of recent experiments designed with the elephant's perspective in mind, scientists now have solid evidence that elephants are just as brilliant as they are big: They are adept tool users and cooperative problem solvers; they are highly empathic, comforting one another when upset; and they probably do have a sense of self.

Despite the sharpened awareness of elephant sentience, many zoos around the world continue to maintain or expand their elephant exhibits and increasing numbers of heavily armed poachers are descending on Africa to meet the soaring demand for ivory, killing as many as 35,000 elephants a year. The U.S. recently banned ivory trade, with some exceptions, but there have been no steps toward outlawing elephant captivity. At least a few zoos are using the latest science to transform their elephant enclosures, giving the animals more room to roam as well as intellectually stimulating puzzles. Only some zoos can afford to make such changes, however, and many elephant experts maintain that, given everything we know about the creatures' mental lives, continuing to keep any of them locked up is inexcusable.

Mental mettle
The modern elephant mind emerged from an evolutionary history that has much in common with our own. The African bush and forest elephants, the Asian elephant, and their extinct relatives, the mammoths, all began to assume their recognizable forms between three and five million years ago in Africa. As Louis Irwin of The University of Texas at El Paso explains, both humans and elephants adapted themselves to life in Africa's forests and savannas around the same time, emigrating to Europe and Asia; both evolved to live long and often migratory lives in highly complex societies; both developed intricate systems of communication; and both experienced a dramatic increase in brain size.

Over the years numerous observations of wild elephants suggested that the big-brained beasts were some of the most intelligent animals on the planet. They remembered the locations of water holes hundreds of kilometers apart, returning to them year after year. They fashioned twigs into switches to shoo flies and plugged drinking holes with chewed up balls of bark. They clearly formed strong social bonds and even seemed to mourn their dead (see " When Animals Mourn" in the July 2013 issue of Scientific American). Yet scientists rarely investigated this ostensibly immense intellect in carefully managed experiments. Instead, researchers looking for evidence of exceptional mental aptitude in nonhuman animals first turned to chimpanzees and, later, to brainy birds like ravens, crows and some parrots. Only in the past 10 years have scientists rigorously tested elephant cognition. Again and again these new studies have corroborated what zoologists inferred from behavior in the wild.

Scientists living among herds of wild elephants have long observed awe-inspiring cooperation between family members. Related elephant mothers and their children stay together throughout life in tight-knit clans, caring for one another's children and forming protective circles around calves when threatened by lions or poachers. Elephant clan members talk to one another with a combination of gentle chirps, thunderous trumpets and low-frequency rumbles undetectable to humans, as well as nudges, kicks and visual signals such as a tilt of the head or flap of the ear. They deliberate among themselves, make group decisions and applaud their achievements. "Being part of an elephant family is all about unity and working together for the greater good," says Joyce Poole, one of the world's foremost elephant experts and co-founder of the charity ElephantVoices, which promotes the study and ethical care of elephants. "When they are getting ready to do a group charge, for example, they all look to one another: 'Are we all together? Are we ready to do this?' When they succeed, they have an enormous celebration, trumpeting, rumbling, lifting their heads high, clanking tusks together, intertwining their trunks."

Cynthia Moss, director of the Amboseli Trust for Elephants and another preeminent elephant researcher, once saw a particularly amazing example of elephant cooperation. One day the young and audacious Ebony, daughter of a matriarch named Echo, bounded right into the midst of a clan that was not her own. As a show of dominance, that clan kidnapped Ebony, keeping her captive with their trunks and legs. After failing to retrieve Ebony on their own, Echo and her eldest daughters retreated. A few minutes later they returned with all the members of their extended family, charged into the clan of kidnappers and rescued Ebony. "That took forethought, teamwork and problem-solving," Moss says. "How did Echo convey that she needed them? It's a mystery to me, but it happened."

In 2010 Joshua Plotnik of Mahidol University in Thailand and his colleagues tested elephant cooperation in a controlled study for the first time. At a Thai conservation center, they divided an outdoor elephant enclosure into two regions with a volleyball net. On one side stood pairs of Asian elephants. On the other side the researchers attached two bowls of corn to a table that slid back and forth on a frame of plastic pipes. They looped a hemp rope around the table so that when both ends of the rope were pulled simultaneously the table moved toward the elephants, pushing the food underneath the net. If a single elephant tried to pull the rope by him or herself, it would slip out and ruin any chance of getting the food. All the elephants quickly learned to cooperate and even to patiently wait for a partner if the scientists prevented both animals from reaching the rope at the same time. One mischievous young elephant outsmarted the rest. Instead of going through the hassle of tugging on one end of the rope, she simply stood on it and let her partner do all the hard work.

Some scientists studying wild elephants have argued that, in addition to cooperating for survival's sake, the creatures are capable of genuine empathy. Poole recalls, for example, one elephant flinching as another stretched her trunk towards an electric fence; it was fortunately inactive at the time but had been live in the past. Elephants often refuse to leave their sick and injured behind, even if the ailing animal is not a direct relative.Poole once observed three young male elephants struggle to revive a dying matriarch, lifting her body with their tusks to get her back on her feet. Another time, while driving through Kenya's Amboseli National Park, Poole saw a female elephant give birth to a stillborn baby. The mother guarded her dead calf for two days, trying over and over to revive its limp body. Realizing that the grieving mom had not had any sustenance this whole time, Poole drove near her with an offering of water. The elephant stretched her trunk inside the car and eagerly drank her fill. When she was done, she remained with Poole for a few moments, gently touching her chest.

When elephants encounter an elephant skeleton, they slow down, approach it cautiously, and caressthe bones with their trunk and the bottoms of their sensitive padded feet. Elephants do not show the same interest in the remains of other species. In one experiment elephants spent twice as much time investigating an elephant skull as those of either a rhinoceros and buffalo and six times longer probing ivory than a piece of wood. Moss has witnessed elephants kicking dirt over skeletons and covering them with palm fronds.

Plotnik and renowned animal behavior expert Frans de Waal of Emory University recently teamed up to study elephant empathy. On a monthly basis between the spring of 2008 and 2009 they observed 26 Asian elephants at the Elephant Nature Park in Thailand, looking for signs of what researchers call "consolation." Many animals are capable "reconciliation"-making up after a tussle. Far fewer animals display true consolation: when a bystander goes out of his or her way to comfort the victim of a fight or an individual that is disturbed for some reason. On dozens of occasions Plotnik and de Waal saw elephants consoling one another. A perturbed elephant often perks up its ears and tail and squeals, roars or trumpets. Over the course of the study, many elephants behaved in this way, because of an altercation, because they were spooked by something-such as a helicopter or dog-or for an unknown cause. When other elephants recognized these signs of anxiety, they rushed to the upset animal's side, chirping softly and stroking their fellow elephant's head and genitals. Sometimes the elephants put their trunks in one another's mouths-a sign of trust because doing so risks being bitten.

The aspect of elephant intelligence that is the trickiest to gauge-the one that has really challenged scientists to think like an elephant-is self-awareness. Scientists now have preliminary evidence that elephants are indeed self-aware, overturning previous findings. To determine whether an animal has a sense of self, researchers first place a mark on an animal's body that it can identify only with the help of a mirror. Then they wait to see if the animal tries to get rid of the mark when it encounters its reflection. Doing so, the reasoning goes, means the animal understands when it is looking at itself rather than another animal. In the earliest studies on elephant self-awareness, researchers placed a one by 2.5-meter mirror outside the bars of an enclosure, angled in such a way that the animals could see only the upper thirds of their bodies. The elephants reacted to the reflection as they would to another elephant, raising their trunks in greeting. When the scientists dabbed the elephants' faces with white cream, the animals failed to recognize that the marks were on their own bodies.

But what if the experimental design itself prevented the elephants from understanding that they were looking at themselves in the mirror? After all, elephants identify one another primarily by touch, scent and sound-not sight-and the animals in the study could not physically investigate the mirror. So Reiss, de Waal and Plotnik decided to redo these experiments, this time allowing the elephants to use all their senses.

In 2005 the trio constructed a 2.5 by 2.5-meter shatterproof mirror and bolted it to a wall surrounding an elephant yard at the Bronx Zoo in New York City. Three female Asian elephants named Patty, Maxine and Happy were free to approach and inspect the sturdy mirror at their leisure. When they first encountered the contraption, Maxine and Patty swung their trunks over it and attempted to scale the wall to which it was attached, as though checking to see whether another elephant was hiding behind the glass. When they found nothing, all three elephants swayed their trunks and bobbed their heads while looking right into the mirror, just as we might wave our hands to see whether a shadow is our own. They stared at their reflection and stuck their trunks inside their mouths as though searching for snagged spinach.

A few days later the scientists painted a white X onto the right side of each elephant's face. Maxine and Patty did not seem to notice the marks, but Happy began to touch the X on her face with her trunk after strolling past the mirror a few times. Eventually she faced her reflection and repeatedly swiped at the painted part of her face with the tip of her trunk.

The fact that only one of three elephants noticed the X on its face might seem a disappointing performance, but it is actually quite remarkable. Reiss points out that even in studies with chimpanzees-which most researchers accept are self-aware-sometimes fewer than half pass the mirror test. Plotnik argues that expecting elephants to pay attention to a random blotch on their face may not have been the best test of their self-awareness anyhow. Whereas chimpanzees are fastidious groomers that spend hours picking nits and gnats out of one another's hair, elephants stay clean by getting dirty, routinely spraying themselves with dust and dirt to deter insects and parasites. And they love to galumph in mud. "There's no reason to think elephants would have same kind of vanity," Plotnik says.

Brains behind bars
All the new evidence of elephant intelligence has intensified the debate about whether to continue keeping the creatures in captivity. Former elephant caretaker Dan Koehl maintains a thorough database of elephants around the world. He has records of 7,828 elephants currently in captivity: 1,654 in zoos or safari parks; 4,549 in "elephant camps" where tourists can ride the animals; 288 in circuses; and the remaining in temples, sanctuaries or private residences. The latest research on the well-being of U.S. zoo elephants is not particularly encouraging. With mny collaborators, animal welfare expert and Vistalogic, Inc., consultant Cheryl Meehan recently completed a gint study on nearly all of the 300 or so elephants in North American zoos accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). The researchers assessed the physical and mental health of captive elephants with a combination of photographs, videos, blood and hormone tests, veterinary reports, and surveys filled out by caretakers: about 75 percent of the elephants were overweight or obese; between 25 and 40 percent had foot or joint problems of some kind depending on the year; and 80 percent displayed behavioral tics, such as pacing and continual head bobbing or swaying.

Stephen Harris of the University of Bristol and his colleagues conducted a similar study on U.K. zoo elephants in the late 2000s. I asked him whether it is possible to keep an elephant physically and mentally healthy in a zoo. His answer was succinct: "No." The elephants he studied spent up to 83 percent of their time indoors, often in cramped conditions; the majority had abnormal gaits; 75 percent were overweight; more than 50 percent had behavioral tics; and one individual displayed tics for 14 hours in a single day. Captive elephants also have higher rates of infertility and die younger on average than their uncaged counterparts. Whereas wild elephants migrate great distances through the forest or savanna in search of food and water-eating huge amounts of tough, fibrous grasses and shrubs that are difficult to digest-zoo elephants spend too many hours standing idle on concrete and consume calorie-rich foods they would rarely encounter in their native habitat. Researchers have also learned that many zoo elephants do not get the rest they need because they do not like to lie down and sleep on stone or other hard surfaces.

Few zoos can adequately re-create the complex social life of wild elephants. Female elephants in captivity are often strangers acquired from here and there. Any friendships that do form can dissolve in an instant when a zoo decides to relocate an animal. "Sometimes people treat these creatures like furniture," Moss says. Researchers used to think that male elephants, which leave their clans in young adulthood, were loners. They now know, however, that male elephants socialize extensively with one another. Yet zoos mix males and females in ways that would never occur in the wild and try to offload adult males if they become too cantankerous or lustful.

Now that the evidence of the elephant's intellect and emotional lifeis no longer mostly anecdotal the zoological community faces even more pressure to answer a daunting question: Why keep elephants in captivity at all? Zoos usually give two main reasons: to rescue elephants from dire situations, such as the threat of poachers or the stress of living in so-called rehabilitation centers in Asia that keep the creatures leashed to trees; and to teach the public how amazing elephants are, in hopes of promoting their conservation.

These arguments have become increasingly tenuous over time. Few elephants in zoos today were rescued from an awful life; instead they were born in captivity. In the mid-2000s zoos embarked on an especially aggressive captive elephant breeding program, trying to compensate for all the animals they had lost to disease and frailty. "For every elephant born in a zoo, on average another two die," concluded a comprehensive 2012 investigative report by The Seattle Times. As for educational outreach, modern technology has rendered zoos obsolete. "When I was a kid we had no television and even when we did wildlife images were very few," Harris says. "You went to the zoo to interact with elephants, to ride on them and touch them-there was no other way to get a sense of them. Now of course there's an information overload. You can get a sense of scale and see all kinds of wonderful behaviors from photography and films that you would never see in captivity." Consider how much one can learn from vivid scenes of wild elephants in a nature documentary of Planet Earth caliber compared with the experience of staring at an arthritic bobble-headed zoo elephant.

Other scientists think that, even if there are few good reasons to keep elephants in zoos in the first place, arguing for an abrupt end to elephant captivity is naive and idealistic, especially outside North America and Europe. "Although I believe all elephants should be wild, unfortunately that is not realistic," Plotnik says. In Asia, where he works, people have been using elephants as beasts of burden for centuries and currently have thousands of the animals captive in camps. Suddenly releasing all those animals is simply not feasible; there may not even be enough wild habitat left to accommodate them all. Plotnik thinks the best way forward is maintaining the wild Asian elephant population through conservation and slowly phasing out the captive one by finding new, equally lucrative jobs for elephant caretakers. Moss wants something similar for elephants in zoos in the U.S. and Europe: "I would like to see them live out their lives and have no more breeding or importation." Meehan hopes the kind of information she has collected will help improve the well-being of zoo elephants.

In recent years at least a few zoos have been trying to use animal welfare science to make their elephant enclosures more like sanctuaries. The Oregon Zoo in Portland is close to remodeling its elephant habitat in a way it claims will improve the livelihood of its four male and four female Asian elephants. Elephant Lands, set to open in 2015, is a hilly 2.5-hectare habitat covered mostly in deep sand rather than concrete and featuring a 490,000-liter pool for wallowing, bathing and playing. Elephants will be free to roam from one part of the terrain to another, explains elephant curator Bob Lee, which should hopefully allow males and females to interact as they choose. Various feeding machines will provide elephants with food at random intervals, because studies have linked such unpredictability to healthier body weights. Other feeders will exercise the elephants' trunks and brains with out-of-reach snacks and mechanical puzzles.

Refurbishing elephant enclosures so they are roomier and more intellectually stimulating is at once an acknowledgment and dismissal of the research on elephant intelligence and welfare. After all, if the zoos really have the animals' best interests at heart, they would close their elephant exhibits. In 2005 the Detroit Zoo became the first to give up its elephants solely on ethical grounds. Spending so much time in close quarters-and waiting out the harsh Michigan winters indoors-left their two Asian elephants physically and mentally ill. Wanda and Winky were moved to the Performing Animal Welfare Society's (PAWS) 930-hectare sanctuary in San Andreas, Calif. A handful of zoos have followed suit, but they are in the minority.

Ed Stewart, president and co-founder of PAWS, thinks that even his massive haven is not adequate to keep the elephants as healthy as they would be in the wild. "Elephants should not be in captivity- period," he says. "It doesn't matter if it's a zoo, a circus or a sanctuary. The social structure isn't correct, the space is not right, the climate is not right, the food is not right. You can never do enough to match the wild. They are unbelievably intelligent. With all of that brainpower-to be as limited as they are in captivity-it's a wonder they cope at all. In 20 years I hope we will look back and think, 'Can you believe we ever kept those animals in cages?'"

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The Science Is In: Elephants Are Even Smarter Than We Realized [Video]

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One day in 2010, while taking a stroll in his backyard, Kandula the elephant smelled something scrumptious. The scent pulled his attention skyward. There, seemingly suspended in the air, was a sprig of bamboo decorated with bits of cantaloupe and honeydew.

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Squirrels communicate with each other through various vocalisations and scent marking. They also use their tails as a signalling device, twitching it when uneasy to alert other squirrels of potential danger.

Amazing Facts About the Squirrel

There are over 265 species of squirrel worldwide. The smallest is the African pygmy squirrel which is tiny at around 10 cm long, whereas the largest, the Indian giant squirrel is a massive three feet long.

When a squirrel is scared and feels that it is in danger, it will at first remain motionless. If it is on the ground, it will run to a nearby tree and climb to safety, and if it is already in a tree it will circle the trunk and press up against the bark tightly with its body.

Squirrels are very trusting animals, and are of the very few wild animal species which will eat out of a person's hand.

In colder regions such as the UK, squirrels plan ahead in order to survive the challenging winter months. They store nuts and seeds at various locations and return to them throughout the winter to maintain their energy levels when food is scarce.

Squirrels tend to run in erratic paths. This is intended to deceive potential predators as to its chosen direction so that it may escape.

Squirrels are extremely intelligent creatures. They are known to put on elaborate bogus food burying displays to deceive onlookers. The fake burials are to trick potential thieves, such as other squirrels or birds, into thinking that they have stored their food stock there. Any observers planning on taking the stash will then focus on the bogus burial site, allowing the squirrel to bury the real stash elsewhere safely.

Tree-dwelling squirrels such as the grey squirrel build dreys (similar to bird's nests) made of twigs high in trees. They are about the size of a football and are lined with grass, bark, moss and feathers for added comfort and insulation.

Squirrels communicate with each other through various vocalisations and scent marking. They also use their tails as a signalling device, twitching it when uneasy to alert other squirrels of potential danger.

There are 44 species of 'flying squirrel'. Rather than actually flying, these species glide using a membrane which stretches from their wrists to their ankles. It allows squirrels to glide naturally like humans do with the aid of a parachute.

The squirrel is the Native American symbol for preparation, trust and thriftiness.

Find more animals like this

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Amazing Facts about Squirrels | OneKindPlanet Animal Education & Facts

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Squirrels communicate with each other through various vocalisations and scent marking. They also use their tails as a signalling device, twitching it when uneasy to alert other squirrels of potential danger. There are over 265 species of squirrel worldwide.

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There's a reason behind the old adage, "an elephant never forgets." Read on to learn more about these brilliant, beautiful creatures.

BlueOrange Studio/Shutterstock

Sure your dog is smart. But there's dog-smart, and then there's, well, elephant-smart. For example, if you hold a mirror up to your dog, he may bark or even try to play with his reflection. That's because dogs as a species aren't capable of self-awareness. But elephants are; they are one of a very few species of animal that can look in the mirror and realize they're seeing themselves. As amazing as that is, pachyderms also hold the honor of being one of the even fewer species that can recognize their bodies as separate from surrounding physical objects, as suggested by a 2017 study out of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

For that study, elephant intelligence researchers had elephants step onto a rubber mat, pick up a stick from the mat, then pass the stick to a person standing in front of them. The elephants were divided into two groups:

For Group 1, the stick was attached to the mat with a rope, which meant the elephant wouldn't be able to pass the stick without stepping off the mat. The researchers hypothesized that only an animal with a sense of his body in space would be able to figure out that it was necessary to step off the mat.

For Group 2, the stick wasn't attached, which meant the elephant could pass the stick even while remaining on the mat.

As it turned out, the elephants in Group 1 stepped off the mat significantly more often than the elephants in Group 2. That means they were capable of recognizing their own bodies as obstacles to the task at hand-passing the stick. That keen level of self-awareness is so rare in the animal kingdom, we don't generally see it even in humans before the age of two, points out one of the researchers, Josh Plotnik, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York and founder of conservation charity Think Elephants International.

"Elephants are well regarded as one of the most intelligent animals on the planet," states the lead author of the Cambridge study, Rachel Dale, a PhD candidate at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria. In addition to self-awareness, elephants demonstrate complicated decision-making skills, both alone and in cooperation with other members of their herd, with whom they communicate using a combination of "gentle chirps, thunderous trumpets, and low-frequency rumbles...as well as nudges, kicks, and visual signals such as a tilt of the head or flap of the ear," according to . They can be seen "deliberating" amongst themselves prior to initiating a group action. and afterward, they can be seen celebrating by lifting their heads high, clanging tusks together, and intertwining their trunks. All of this suggests more than mere mental acuity, but actual empathy in elephants. Find out what other facts you may have had wrong about different animals.

But if there's any doubt, elephants have been observed helping those who are injured by bringing them food and water, grieving for family members who have died, and burying their dead. Elephants are even capable of understanding what "pointing means," which is an important milestone in child development, and although some dogs understand it, many otherwise intelligent animals, including chimpanzees, do not appear to. But as smart as elephants are, there's one thing they can't do. Read on to find out what that is along with 45 other amazing facts about your favorite animals.

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There's a reason behind the old adage, "an elephant never forgets." Read on to learn more about these brilliant, beautiful creatures. BlueOrange Studio/Shutterstock Sure your dog is smart. But there's dog-smart, and then there's, well, elephant-smart. For example, if you hold a mirror up to your dog, he may bark or even try to play with his reflection.

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Honey bees have very small brains-yet they are highly intelligent and it is more than instinct. The intelligence resides in the individual bee; there is no "hive-mind." If this information is new to you, you will never look at these tiny creatures in the same way again.

How Smart Are Honey Bees?

What Are the Characteristics of Honey Bees' Brains?

Their brain is about the size of a sesame seed. It measures just one cubic millimeter. Their brains may be tiny, but they have larger brains and more neurons than other insects of similar size.

They compensate for their small brain size with greater brain density. Their brain is ten times denser than the brains of mammals.

They have a sophisticated sensory system which gives them excellent sight (including the ability to see ultra violet and polarized light.) and keen smell, taste, and touch.

Their brains appear to have neuroplasticity which means that their brain is capable of learning and adapting and performing the same functions, such as memory, in various places in the brain.

How Do We Know Honey Bees Are Smart?

We know they are smart from observing their behavior and by conducting experiments that demonstrate their learning and memory abilities.

They can identify and remember colors and landmarks. They can distinguish among different landscapes, types of flowers, shapes, and patterns.

Bees can remember route details up to six miles over several days. They can conceptualize a map, determine the shortest distance between two points, and take a different route for their outbound and inbound journeys.They can navigate even in the dark.

They are able to take on many different roles in their lifetime, each requiring different skills. The youngest bees are nurse bees, tending to the brood (the pupa or larva stage). Later they make the honey combs, forming perfect hexagonal shapes. Lastly, they become foragers, finding honey and bringing it back to the hive.

They can distinguish harmful fungi from harmless ones. They can prepare medication (propolis) when harmful fungi are present.

Can Honey Bees Think?

Experiments and observations show that honey bees do indeed have the ability to think.

They have an ability to learn many new things very quickly. Compared to other insects, they have a much greater ability to learn and remember.

They are capable of abstract thought, decision-making, and planning. They also show an ability to count and an understanding of time.

The foragers have to perform many tasks that require intelligence-- they must find flowers, figure out if they are a good source of nectar, find their way back to the hive, and then share this information with the other foragers.

They do not use tools in nature, but they can be taught to use tools

They may be capable of cultural transmission. Experiments have shown that when one bee was taught to pull a string to get a sugary reward, another bee learned the trick just by watching the first bee. Even more surprising, they could teach this trick to other bees.

Can Honey Bees Communicate?

Do Honey Bees Have a Language?

They have is a sophisticated communication system using a symbolic language. This system is not found in any other animal. They communicate by using "body language" and "dance."

When a honey bee finds a good source of nectar, she will return to the hive and tell the other bees where to find it by doing a dance to communicate both the location and quality of the source.

There are several types of dances that are done on the honey comb in the darkness of the hive.

The round dance

The simplest dance is the "round dance." The bee dances around in a circle. This tells the others that the food source is very close. They can go out and just sniff around to find it. (They know what to sniff for because they can smell the odor on the forager's body or because she has given them a little taste.)

The waggle dance

If the nectar source is further away, the forager does a "waggle dance." The bee begins by walking in a straight line to indicate the direction of the food source relative to the sun. She then dances to create an angle which indicates the precise location of the food source relative to the sun. She waggles her body as she does this; the number of waggles indicate the distance.

Imagine a line connecting the hive and the food source, and another line connecting the hive to the spot on the horizon just beneath the sun. The angle formed by those two lines indicates the location of the food source relative to the sun.

The bee adjusts the angle of her dance to account for the fact that the sun is always moving across the sky. The dancer takes this into account and changes the angle of her dance every four minutes by one degree to the west.

Finally, the time she takes doing the dance indicates the strength of the headwind. This tells the other bees how much honey they need to eat to have enough energy for the trip.

A Diagram of the Waggle Dance

The tremble dance

A third type of dance is the tremble dance. A forager shakes her body back and forth, at the same time rotating her body axis by about 50 degrees every second or so, all the while walking slowly across the comb.

It is done when a forager bee experiences a delay in unloading her nectar back at the hive due to a shortage of bees to receive it. It stops other nearby worker bees from flying to collect more honey and recruits more worker bees to the task of processing the incoming nectar.

It functions as a mechanism for keeping nectar processing at an optimal rate by stimulating more bees to process the honey and inhibiting other bees from bringing nectar into the hive.

The DVAV dance (dorsoventral abdominal vibrating)

The DVAV dance is another way of optimally allocating labor resources. A bee charges at another bee, pushing with her head and grabbing with her feet. She jumps on top of the bee and shakes her abdomen up and down.

This action tells the second bee that a rich source of nectar has been found and more bees are needed to collect it. The second bee goes to watch the waggle dance and then joins the foraging efforts.

Other dances

There are a number of other types of dances. These are a few of them.

The sickle dance is shaped like a figure- 8 and says the nectar source is close, but not real close.

The jostling dance is a bee nudging other bees to get them to watch her waggle dance.

The spasmodic dance is a form of the jostling dance that includes a bee giving the other bees a taste of the nectar.

How Do Honey Bees Use Pheromones to Communicate?

All of the hive occupants can release pheromones-- queens, workers, drones, brood, and even the comb. The queen has a special pheromone called the "queen's substance" which is used to regulate the hive.

The bees secrete pheromones to communicate many different things. The pheromones stimulate or suppress behaviors and also can be used to alert the hive to intruders.

How Do Honey Bees Use Trophallaxis to Communicate?

Trophallaxis is a fancy word for food sharing. One bee will ask for a taste from another bee by pushing her tongue towards the other's mouth parts. The giver bee will respond by opening her mandibles, regurgitating a drop of nectar, and pushing it forward on her tongue so the other bee can taste it.

During trophallaxis the antennae of the two bees will touch, allowing them to pass on scent messages.

How Do Honey Bees Make Decisions?

Foraging requires no central decision making. Each bee knows only about her own nectar source. If the nectar source is poor, she will quickly abandon it and will not do a waggle dance to direct her hive mates to it. Instead, she will watch the waggle dance of another bee who has found a good source of nectar and turn her foraging efforts to that source.

On the other hand, if her source is good, she will work that source consistently and recruit other bees to join her.

Each individual bee makes her own individual cost-benefit analysis, which affects whether or not she will abandon a source or recruit other bees to it. If she abandons her source, she will follow another bee at random; she does not compare sources.

Since only bees with good sources are recruiting, the bee who has abandoned her source will almost certainly move to a better source. The result is that the entire hive has optimized foraging-- the decisions of thousands of individual bees lead to optimal collection of food resources.

The value of a nectar source is not based only on the sugar content of the source-it appears that distance from the hive, weather conditions, the hive's nutritional status, the depletion of the source, and other pertinent factors are all involved.

What If Humans Had Bee Brains?

What If Humans Had A Bee Brain?

Imagine how smart humans would be if our much larger brains had the capabilities of a bee brain. A bee brain brain is about 20,000 times smaller than a human brain. They have only 960,000 neurons in their brain compared to 100 billion neurons for humans. Yet they are able to do so much.

Wouldn't it be great to have an internal GPS? How do bees do it? Some say that they can sense the earth's magnetic fields or the polarization of the sun's light. A new theory is that the bee may be able to sense quantum fields or quarks.

Wouldn't it be great to have an internal clock that could tell time exactly? The bees seem to have some innate sense of the sun's motion and location.

Wouldn't it be great to be able to do instant computations faster than even the fastest computers? Honey bees must do very complicated computations for navigation. They are able to do about 10 trillion computations in a second, which is 625 times faster than the 6 billion computations per second of the fastest computer.)

Wouldn't it be great to live in live in a cooperative community with a democratic process for making optimal decisions?

It's interesting to think about.

Learn More About the Waggle Dance in This Video

Questions & Answers

Question: Can bees be taught to organize?

Answer: Bees do not have to be taught how to organize. They are "born" knowing how to organize. Bees are one of the most organized animal societies on Earth. Every bee in a bee hive has specialized duties.
© 2017 Catherine Giordano
kingston on January 07, 2020:

this so cool it is helping me know how bees are the smartest animal

Catherine Giordano (author) from Orlando Florida on November 13, 2017:

Patricia Scott: Thank you for your interest in honey bees. They are a very important part of the ecosystem and amazing little creatures.

Patricia Scott from North Central Florida on November 13, 2017:

So much I did not know...thank you for filling in the gaps in my knowledge. I know how valuable and important they are to us and do all that I can to encourage them to hang around.

Angels are on the way to you this afternoon ps

Catherine Giordano (author) from Orlando Florida on November 03, 2017:

Carson N: I am pleased I could help. Did it help with beekeeping or were you doing research for a school assignment or for your own article about bees? Thanks for your comment.

Carson N on November 03, 2017:

This article helped me with my project thanks so much!

Catherine Giordano (author) from Orlando Florida on April 12, 2017:

bravewarrior: Bees continue to amaze me in so many ways. They are so highly evolved--and very smart. Perhaps if someone calls you a bee-brain, they mean it as a compliment. Thanks for your comment.

Shauna L Bowling from Central Florida on April 11, 2017:

Bees' various dances are fascinating, Catherine. What a way to communicate! And they're talented mathematicians to boot. Smart and artistic. Seems we humans can learn something from these tiny creatures.

Catherine Giordano (author) from Orlando Florida on March 14, 2017:

Claire: Congrats on becoming a beekeeper. It is such a rewarding activity. Mu suggestion is to find a local beekeeper association and join it, if you have not already done so.

Claire McCann on March 14, 2017:

Hello! I'm just getting started and have my hive box! Now placing it and getting the Queen and bees! I enjoyed your article very much! Hopefully, I'll learn some more about these critters and what all I have to do to keep them happy and productive!!

Larry Rankin from Oklahoma on March 12, 2017:

Always interesting.

Catherine Giordano (author) from Orlando Florida on March 11, 2017:

Chitrangada: You make a very good point. Birds may also have more intelligence than we give them credit for. Maybe being a bird-brain isn't an insult at all. And being a bee-brain is very high praise. Nature is indeed full of amazing things if we stop to look for them. Thanks for your comment.

Catherine Giordano (author) from Orlando Florida on March 11, 2017:

Paula: I see you like bee puns. You should take a look at my hub "The Bee's Knees". It is full of bee puns. Now that I know how smart bees are, I also can't look at them same way. Thanks for your comment.

Catherine Giordano (author) from Orlando Florida on March 11, 2017:

Grand Old Lady: It is so nice of you to tel me how much you liked this article. The bee "dances" are a kind of sign language; each part of the dance provides information.

Chitrangada Sharan from New Delhi, India on March 11, 2017:

Excellent hub and very well presented! Honey bees are no doubt very intelligent! The Nature and it's creatures are just amazing and we can always learn something from them.

I sometimes feel amazed to see the birds and how they weave their nests. All these creatures are so systematic, methodical with a great sense of time , direction , weather and what not!

Thanks for sharing this interesting, informative and enlightening hub!

Grand Old Lady on March 10, 2017:

This is a very interesting and informative article about bees. They seem to be very intelligent indeed. I used to always wonder why my sister was so into propolis, now I know it's because it attacks fungi. I think it's cool the way they communicate through different types of dances. Well done:)

Suzie from Carson City on March 10, 2017:

Wow! Catherine, you write wonderful hubs no matter the topic! Thanks for this education. Did I know bees were so stingingly smart?? No I didn't, but thanks to you, I do now and it's all very fascinating to me. I don't think I'll ever look at a bee in the same way again! Have a great week-end and BEE HAPPY!

Catherine Giordano (author) from Orlando Florida on March 10, 2017:

MsDora: I will never look at bees the same way again. Bees are using a complex symbolic language--and no other insect or animal does this. It might be like when experimenters teach gorillas how to use sign language, except no one has to teach it to the bees. Thanks for the comment. By the way, I had to leave so much information out because the piece was getting too long. I might have to do a second piece on this topic.

Catherine Giordano (author) from Orlando Florida on March 10, 2017:

FlourishAnyway: You are so right.Humans don't see the intelligence of other animals with whom we share this planet. My research on bees has got me thinking about what other animals we are underestimating. Thanks for your comment.

Catherine Giordano (author) from Orlando Florida on March 10, 2017:

janshares: Thank you for your comment. Researching this piece was finding one astounding fact after another. The last section of my essay was written because I really do think bees are smarter than humans taking into consideration the tiny size of their brain.

Dora Weithers from The Caribbean on March 10, 2017:

Especially interesting is their communication by dance, and humans can benefit by practicing their spasmodic dance, focusing on the intent. Altogether, their intelligence makes them admirable creatures. Thanks for all these amazing facts.

FlourishAnyway from USA on March 09, 2017:

Truly remarkable creatures to be able to decide and communicate in these ways. There is so much intelligence in non-human animals we have yet to discover and appreciate.

Janis Leslie Evans from Washington, DC on March 09, 2017:

I am stunned. This is amazing. This information about honeybees blew me away, Catherine. It just made me respect even more the power of nature and God, with the ability to create all of us in our uniqueness. But the honeybees? My goodness, they seem to be above all of us, with that little brain, no less. Thanks for an interesting article.

Catherine Giordano (author) from Orlando Florida on March 09, 2017:

Heidithorne: Thanks for making me smile with your "Dancing with the Stars" reference. I'm pleased that you took the time to read, comment, and most of all, appreciate the bees.

Catherine Giordano (author) from Orlando Florida on March 09, 2017:

Peggy Woods: Thanks for your comment and for sharing on pinterest. The more I learn about bees, the more I stand in awe of them.

Catherine Giordano (author) from Orlando Florida on March 09, 2017:

Gwenneth Leane: I think beekeeping is a wonderful hobby. Pollinates your garden, gives you honey, and you get to study these marvelous little creatures up close. Thanks for your comment.

Gwenneth Leane on March 09, 2017:

What a great article about a wonderful kingdom. I look on the swarm as a kingdom ruled by the queen. I used to keep two swarms in my garden, when I had more land than I have now and take the honey. The bees were also kept to pollinate our fruit trees and vegetable.

Peggy Woods from Houston, Texas on March 09, 2017:

This is fascinating information regarding how smart honey bees are and how they communicate with one another. I enjoyed this! Pinning to my Do You Know This board.

Heidi Thorne from Chicago Area on March 09, 2017:

They are so ready for Dancing with the Stars! :) There is so much intelligence in nature that we still don't fully understand. Thanks for sharing this interesting info!

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Honey bees have very small brains-yet they are highly intelligent and it is more than instinct. The intelligence resides in the individual bee; there is no "hive-mind." If this information is new to you, you will never look at these tiny creatures in the same way again.

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Are bees smart? According to scientists, bees know their additions and subtractions. Moreover, they can teach other bees how to complete some tasks. Also, they can teach humans a lot about collective intelligence. Can you?

Scientists know bees are smart and can do some pretty amazing things, and now they have the proof.

We talked to Associate Professor Adrian G. Dyer - one of the researchers involved in the study of bees' math skills - and learned that bees show surprisingly great brainpower.

We have known for some time, e.g. since Karl von Frisch won the Nobel Prize for showing bees communicate with a symbolic dance language, that bees can do some interesting things. We tested bees because they have previously been shown to be good learners, and recently some other animals like Alex the Parrot was shown to understand some basic math concepts. But we were surprised how quickly they learned the problem, suggesting the miniature bee brain is pretty powerful.

Bio-inspired Digital Sensing (BIDS) Lab, School of Media and Communication RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Department of Physiology, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

We thank Mr. Dyer for agreeing to talk to us about how smart are bees in reality and how promising bee research can prove to become for the greater good of humankind.

The study we mentioned above found that bees are capable of performing simple arithmetic with small numbers. What's more, the results surprised scientists that weren't expecting the little creatures to fare so well in their tests. Guess mother nature proved once more that her sack of surprises is endless.

The Mathematicians of the Insect World

Bees aren't just good at spelling, they're also pretty good with math . In fact, they can even solve math problems using addition and subtraction . By studying simple color-coded shapes inside a maze, bees managed to learn how to perform simple arithmetic involving small numbers. What is more, their performance far exceeded expectations.

Because they were given two answer options within the various chambers of the maze, it was initially believed that the 14 bees involved in the study would get it right 50% of the time. however, in the end, the percentage stood at 65%.

This finding is important because it shapes the way in which we understand arithmetic.

Mathematical operations require complex cognitive processes, but it seems that a brain with less than one million neurons can do just as well. Therefore, what humans understand as intelligence might not be as inaccessible to animals as we'd like to believe.

What is more, bees can apparently understand the concept of zero , which is a rare sight when it comes to members of the animal kingdom. So, the next time you'll find yourself wondering "are bees smart?", remember that the answer is "buzz, yeah!"

Take this information and put it on your list of ! We also encourage you to learn more about bees, the , and more research on insects in general. These flawless creatures can teach us so many things, we genuinely wonder why science doesn't focus more on the study of their behaviors.

Are Bees Smart? Yes, Enough to Teach Other Bees How to Complete Tasks

An experiment conducted by researchers at Queen Mary University of London and published in 2017 showed that very clever bees can use tools and teach other bees to perform some tasks. Here is what the scientists had to say:

One hallmark of cognitive complexity is the ability to manipulate objects with a specific goal in mind. Such "tool use" at one time was ascribed to humans alone, but then to primates, next to marine mammals, and later to birds. Now we recognize that many species have the capacity to envision how a particular object might be used to achieve an end. Loukola et al. extend this insight to invertebrates. Bumblebees were trained to see that a ball could be used to produce a reward. These bees then spontaneously rolled the ball when given the chance. Instead of copying demonstrators moving balls over long distances, observers solved the task more efficiently, using the ball positioned closest to the target, even if it was of a different color than the one previously observed. Such unprecedented cognitive flexibility hints that entirely novel behaviors could emerge relatively swiftly in species whose lifestyle demands advanced learning abilities, should relevant ecological pressures arise.

So How Smart Are Bees?

We have known for quite a while that bees have the ability to make accurate collective decisions in their search for nectar sources or new places to nest. Research demonstrated that bees can also avoid herding that was maladaptive for them. Bees are queens (pun intended) of social learning, copying each other's behavior through communication. Thus, they can prevent adverse information from viral spreading within the swarm.

What Do Bees Teach Us?

In 2019, a psychological experiment revealed that humans can learn a lot about social intelligence form bees' behavior. Focusing on the risk of maladaptive herding in humans and on collective decision making, the researchers found that

Stimulating independent thought in individuals may reduce the risk of collective madness. Dividing a group into sub-groups or breaking down a task into small easy steps promotes flexible, yet smart, human "swarm" intelligence. There is much we can learn from the humble bee.

Why Are Bees Important?

Honey bees are some of the most vital tiny creatures that roam around our planet. But why are bees important?

Well, they pollinate flowers, fruits, and vegetables alike, ensuring that plants from all over the world grow and thrive.

While gathering nectar for the hive to feed on, pollen sticks to the little hairs on their body and is transfer between a plant's male and female parts.

However, these bees that we see on a regular basis are just a fraction of a hive's social economy. They are workers, or females who haven't developed sexually . Their main purpose is to provide for larvae, as well as build and protect the hive's structure. Although they are the most essential cogs in the machine, they live for only six weeks on average.

The queen is the only sexually matured honey bee in the community. She lays the eggs and doesn't do much else. Males are called drones, and their sole utility is reproductive. After their job is done in spring and summer, they are excluded from the hive and left to die during the colder months of the year.

Nonetheless, there are plenty of more interesting facts about bees besides them being terrifically organized and highly matriarchal.

Did you know one single insect has 170 odorant receptors? Yup, their sense is 100 times better than ours. Bees can smell particular flowers and toxins even though they are miles away from them.

For this reason, honey bees have been used in cancer research. It seems their accurate and sensory noses can pick up the smell of cancer and help with diagnosis, and they don't need much to go off of. Just a whiff of someone's breath and a bee will instantly know if something is wrong with that person.

How Smart are Bees: Bottom Line

Are bees smart? You can bet your SAT score on it! If you want to learn how cool they are, check out our as well! We learned that bees can do some serious math, teach and learn from each other, and model complex decision making behaviors we could adapt to our world as well.

It is a fact that bees are crucial for the environment and sustainability on this planet. It is also a fact that insect populations are quickly plummeting. Without them - and bees in particular - humanity is going to plummet into a catastrophe.

To help you understand why bees are crucial for our survival and why you should entertain them and not kill them, let's see together a video made by ASAPScience suggestively titled " What Happens If All the Bees Die?" Spoiler alert: nothing good.

In comparison to wasps, who mostly want to kill us all, bees are here to help us survive and teach us a lot of things we should kinda have learned by now, but it is never too late.

So next time you see a bee, remember it can help this world stay alive and thrive. And who knows, maybe, someday, bees will be the instrument to cure cancer...

Want more science now?

Check out our news page where we post interesting studies and discussions (sometimes mocking them mercilessly) for more.

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Are Bees Smart? Yes, Smarter Than Some Humans, In Fact

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Are bees smart? According to scientists, bees know their additions and subtractions. Moreover, they can teach other bees how to complete some tasks. Also, they can teach humans a lot about collective intelligence. Can you? Scientists know bees are smart and can do some pretty amazing things, and now they have the proof.

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Meerkats are known for being incredibly cooperative and ridiculously cute, but there's so much more to discover about these gregarious, often stalwartly erect mammals from Africa. Members of the mongoose family, meerkats are a type of mongoose that weigh an average of about 2 pounds. They make an array of noises to communicate with each other and work together to find food and care for their young.

Here's some interesting trivia about meerkats, also called suricates, including how they like to live, eat, sleep, and more.

1. They're Not Loners

Meerkats hang out in large groups - called a mob or a gang. This can be as many as 50 animals in one mob, but usually, they stick together in a more manageable congregation of 10-15 individuals. The mob is composed of several family groups, according to the National Zoo, with usually one dominant pair in each family. The meerkat families don't have to be related to belong to the same group. Females are typically the dominant members of the mob.

2. Meerkats All Pitch In

All members of the mob do their part by helping to collect food, watch for predators, and take care of the babies. The meerkats acting as lookouts will go to the highest spot in the area they can find - often a rock, bush, or termite mound, reports the San Diego Zoo. They will stand on their hind legs and make a distinct call when they are in place and ready to start their sentry work. While everything is safe, they will make a peeping noise, sometimes the watchman's song. They'll sound a shrill alarm if they spot a bird of prey, so the rest of the group knows to quickly take cover.

3. They Like Fixer-Uppers

No reason to build a new house if the neighbors have already done it for you. Meerkats are great at digging, but they typically just move in to burrows already dug by other animals, such as ground squirrels. They often have as many as 15 entrances and exits with all sorts of chambers and tunnels, some more than six feet deep. There are separate chambers for sleeping and going to the bathroom. A meerkat mob usually has several burrow systems and will relocate every few months.

4. They Are Great at Communication

Meerkats are extroverted and quite chatty with at least 10 different vocalizations, reports the National Zoo. Females tend to be more vocal than males. Some of their sounds include "murmurs, threatening growls and spits, scolding clucks and a defensive alarm bark." If a mob is approached by a predator, they will stand together to form an intimidating group with their hair raised, their backs arched, and they'll make hissing noises. Lookouts have different warning barks and whistles for predators that approach by land versus those that are swooping in from the air.

5. They Watch the Skies

Meerkats know to keep watch for birds of prey as they - along with snakes - are some of their fiercest predators. In fact, according to National Geographic, young meerkats are so afraid of birds that they'll even dive for cover if they see an airplane. They have amazing vision as a meerkat can spot a soaring eagle more than 1,000 feet away. Often, however, they will just crouch and freeze when they spot an airborne threat, hoping they won't be noticed.

6. They Mark Their Territory with Bacteria

Many animals use their body odors to mark their territories. Dogs hike their legs to urinate on their property. Cats rub up against you, marking you with the scent glands in their cheeks and foreheads. Meerkats do something similar but a little more intricate. They make a "paste" of secretions in scent pouches below their tails, which they rub on rocks and plants to mark their territory. The chemical signals found in the scent markers come from odor-producing bacteria that thrive in the secretions, according to a 2017 study from researchers at Duke University published in Scientific Reports.

7. Meerkat Fighting Can Get Serious

Don't let their cute looks fool you. Meerkats can be vicious when fighting over territories, and those conflicts can end in death. In fact in a 2016 study published in the journal Nature, researchers looked at 1,024 animal species. They found that meerkats were the most murderous. About 20% of meerkat deaths are actually murders.

Meerkats will try to avoid fighting, usually with bluffing and aggressive posturing, says the San Diego Zoo. But when there's no option but to go to war, both sides line up across a field and then race at each other, leaping with their tails straight up in the air, throwing out their back legs like bucking horses. Often one mob will psych out the other before any fighting actually takes place.

8. They Love Bugs

Meerkats primarily eat insects, using their sharp sense of smell to dig to find tasty food such as grubs, termites, beetles, and caterpillars. But they don't limit themselves to bugs. Meerkats will also eat small reptiles, eggs, birds, fruit, and some plants. They are also able to kill and eat venomous snakes and scorpions without being hurt. They are immune to the toxic dangers of scorpion venom. Researchers believe that meerkats can withstand as much as six times the venom that would kill a rabbit.

9. Meerkat Eyes Make Life Easier

The meerkat's eyes have adapted well to desert life. They have distinctive dark patches around their eyes that help cut down on the piercing glare of the sun so they have better vision up close and far away. Inside, their eyes have long, horizontal pupils. This unusual shape gives them a wide range of vision without having to actually move their heads. When they dig, a membrane (or third eyelid) covers their eye to protect them from flying sand and other debris.

10. They Sleep in Heaps

When it's time to hit the hay, meerkats don't believe very strongly in space. Their burrows can be about 6 to 8 feet deep and have numerous sleeping chambers, but they like to cuddle up. They will usually pile on top of each other in their sleeping chambers in heaps, snuggled on top of each other for warmth. In summer when it's hotter, they may spread out a little more and may even sleep above ground. But the rest of the year, they find each other for a big pile.

11. They Settle Rivalries With Eating Contests

When a dominant female meerkat in a mob dies, typically her oldest, heaviest daughter will take her place as leader of the mob. But sometimes a younger sibling will outgrow her sister and then a rivalry ensues. They settle who gets to be the new matriarch with an eating contest. A 2016 study published in the journal Nature found that the meerkats manage to adjust their diets - and their growth rate - in order to try to grow bigger than their rivals.

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11 Things You Didn't Know About Meerkats

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Meerkats are known for being incredibly cooperative and ridiculously cute, but there's so much more to discover about these gregarious, often stalwartly erect mammals from Africa. Members of the mongoose family, meerkats are a type of mongoose that weigh an average of about 2 pounds.