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Catherine Giordano is a writer and public speaker who is a great admirer of honey bees.

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.

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.

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.

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 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

© 2017 Catherine Giordano

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Catherine Giordano is a writer and public speaker who is a great admirer of honey bees. 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."

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In apes and humans, the prefrontal cortex is the seat of higher-order cognition, allowing us to reason about the world around us. Insect brains are much simpler and lack anything resembling a prefrontal cortex, yet a new study finds that honeybees can learn to differentiate between objects based on their relation to one another, such as "same or different" and "above or below."

Researchers at the University of Toulouse in France and their colleagues trained bees to enter a Y-shaped maze and travel down one of the arms to receive a reward. At the entrance to the maze, the bees were shown a simple image, such as a circle with black and white vertical stripes. At the fork, each possible path was marked with its own simple image: one path displayed the same vertical stripes, and the other path displayed horizontal stripes. Some bees were rewarded if they crawled down the arm of the maze that was marked with the same stripe pattern as the entrance; others learned to enter the arm that was marked with a different pattern.

After the bees had learned whether "same" or "different" marked the right path, the researchers changed things up-they presented the bees with a colored swatch at the opening to the maze instead of a stripe pattern. At the fork, one path was marked with the same color as the entrance, and the other path was marked with a different color-and the insects continued to choose the correct path, demonstrating that their understanding of same and different carried over to the new stimuli. Similar setups showed the bees could also master the concepts of above versus below and left versus right.

The findings offer insight into the evolution of intelligence. The bees' success suggests that this type of abstract cognition far predates the evolution of the large mammalian brain, according to Aurore Avarguès-Weber, a neuroscientist at Toulouse and co-author of the study published in October 2013 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Avarguès-Weber and co-author and colleague Martin Giurfa hypothesize that sociability and navigation skills may give rise to concept learning, which means the ability to think abstractly very likely exists in yet other species with nervous systems entirely unlike our own.

This article was originally published with the title "Small Brains, Big Ideas"

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In apes and humans, the prefrontal cortex is the seat of higher-order cognition, allowing us to reason about the world around us. Insect brains are much simpler and lack anything resembling a prefrontal cortex, yet a new study finds that honeybees can learn to differentiate between objects based on their relation to one another, such as "same or different" and "above or below."

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A bumblebee flies up to inspect a flower, looking for a taste of nectar. It buzzes around a bit and realises that something is different. The bee can see the flower but cannot reach it.

That is because the "flower" - actually a blue plastic disc with sugar water in the centre - is sitting underneath a sheet of transparent plastic. Luckily for the bee, there is a string attached to the flower. All it has to do is pull on the string, haul out the flower, and sip its reward. So it does.

"When we first started the string-pulling experiments, it was almost a joke," says Lars Chittka of the Queen Mary University of London in the UK. "I laughed my head off when I first saw it. It just looked very funny."

But there is more. Once one bee figured out what it needed to do to access the artificial flower, other bees that were looking on learned the string-tugging trick themselves. The technique even outlasted the original successful bee. It became part of the colony's skillset, transmitted from bee to bee after the first string-pulling bee had died.

"I just couldn't believe what I was seeing," says Chittka.

Bees, it turns out, can solve problems, learn from each other, and pass down that knowledge through generations.

Chittka's lab did an experiment in the 1990s in which they asked whether bees can count. They can

Yet learning to pull on a string is just the latest thing that we now know bees can do. The incredible capacity for learning amongst bees and other social insects has been documented since Victorian times.

Charles Darwin himself suggested that learning could happen across species. He noted that honeybees might learn from watching bumblebees extract nectar in a novel way.

Bees can also learn to recognise colours and patterns. Can they find their way back home from several kilometres away? Not a problem. Recognise human faces? That too. Can bees use tools? Well, that is what Chittka wants to answer next.

Chittka's lab did an experiment in the 1990s in which they asked whether bees can count. They can.

"At that point, we began to scratch our heads a little bit," Chittka says. "How much cleverness can you stick into a tiny brain?"

Bees fly up to 10km away from their hive, through a landscape cluttered with trees and other landmarks

Many people might assume that sophisticated behaviour begins with a large brain. After all, humans have unusually large brains - containing about 86 billion neurons - and we are also an astonishingly clever species. The two characteristics must be linked.

But the more scientists learn about the behaviour of insects and other small animals, the clearer it becomes that complicated skills do not necessarily require a big brain.

"How far can we push these little brains to do surprising things?" asks Chittka. "And should we be as surprised as we are that little-brained creatures can solve these puzzles?"

It now seems that the answer to the latter question is no: we should not be surprised.

For instance, dragonflies zip through the air, catching mosquitoes, moths, butterflies and even other dragonflies.

It is a harder task than appearances might suggest. Each different prey species has a unique flight pattern. The dragonfly has to watch how its prey is flying, predict its likely trajectory, and then move to try to intercept it mid-flight. This requires behavioural flexibility and planning.

Researchers have even worked out exactly which individual neurons are responsible for the formation of this memory

Meanwhile, bees fly up to 10km away from their hive, through a landscape cluttered with trees and other landmarks. They have to find the best flowers with the greatest pay-off of nectar, and remember their locations. They also have to avoid predators and make it back home again, where they then communicate with other bees in intricate social interactions.

These creatures have complex worlds, and need the cognitive capacity to survive in them.

Even a simple nematode worm, an animal less than 1mm long and with only 302 neurons in its entire nervous system, is capable of basic learning and memory. Newly-hatched nematodes that encounter toxin-emitting Escherichia coli bacteria remember to avoid the microbes for the rest of their four-day lifespans.

Researchers have even worked out exactly which individual neurons are responsible for the formation of this memory and for retrieving it later on.

If such minute brains are capable of these cognitive tasks, how exactly do they do it? To understand this, we need to get down to the level of the individual neurons and the circuits they form.

Neurons act a little like wires, carrying electrical signals from one part of the brain to another. They are a biological version of the circuit board in a computer.

There are powerful research tools that allow Vivek to selectively switch on or off different parts of the brain

Studying this circuitry is key to understanding cognition, and it is easier to do in small brains with hundreds or thousands of neurons than in large brains with billions. Tiny brains have to pack the maximum computational power into a small space, so they have evolved minimal wiring solutions.

Vivek Jayaraman, at the Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, studies fruit flies. With 250,000 neurons, fruit fly brains are about a quarter of the size of a bee's.

"The brain has to solve computational problems in order for behaviour to unfold," explains Vivek. "And complex behaviour involves solving a bunch of these problems."

Vivek, an engineer by training, wants to understand the mechanics underlying the behaviour. How does the brain do cognition? For this, he needs to see what the neurons are doing as the behaviour unfolds.

Vivek and his colleagues showed that fruit flies have a sort of mind's eye

But can we step into the brain of a fruit fly and listen in to what they are thinking? Well, sort of. There are powerful research tools that allow Vivek to selectively switch on or off different parts of the brain, then watch as neurons activate in real time.

For instance, one measure of cognition is being able to keep track of where you are in space - an internal representation of the world around you. Having an internal representation means that if the lights suddenly go out in the room you are in, you still know which direction you are facing, where the door is, and how to get to the kitchen where you have a flashlight in the drawer.

You are able to maintain awareness of your body position relative to objects in the room and how to move around within that space. Think of this as your mind's eye.

In 2015, Vivek and his colleagues showed that fruit flies have a similar sort of mind's eye.

The scientists used a technique that allows them to see individual fly neurons turning on and off in real time as the insect navigates through a virtual reality world.

This little insect... essentially has a picture in its head of where it is

The fruit fly walks on a tiny treadmill - actually a ball that rotates as the fly walks forward, stops, or moves in any direction. At the same time a screen surrounds the treadmill, like a fly version of an Imax movie, onto which the researchers project lights.

As the fly walks around on the ball, the lights on the screen move in response, as if the fly were moving around in the real world. So if the fly turns to the left, its world on the screen correspondingly moves to the right.

The researchers are able to watch as different parts of the fly's brain become active as the fly navigates this world. Then they turn off the lights. Just as in humans, the fly brain continues to respond as if the lights are on even after they are switched off. It maintains an internal representation of its surroundings.

Cognitive representations like this were previously thought to be the sole domain of backboned animals like us, but that might not be the case.

With just a few hundred or thousand neurons, you can easily recognise perhaps a hundred faces

"The fact that this little insect can sit in the darkness, and essentially has a picture in its head of where it is, is pretty remarkable," Vivek says.

The next step is to find out if this internal representation is flexible. If your roommate tells you that he has moved the flashlight from the kitchen to the bedroom, your internal representation must change to accommodate this new information.

"That for me is a kind of building block of cognition," Vivek says. "The ability to plan based on an internal representation and a memory, rather than just responding to what we see right now."

Can the fruit flies do something similar even with their tiny brains? We may know before too long.

"There is a general perception," says Chittka, "that because we are big-brained, in order to do clever things you need to have very big brains. But that's not actually the case."

For instance, the ability to recognise faces, which was once thought to be a uniquely human ability, turns out to require a relatively simple neural circuitry - which probably explains how bees can carry out the task.

There are some things that a bigger brain might allow, but some of them might be fairly boring

"With just a few hundred or thousand neurons, you can easily recognise perhaps a hundred faces," he says.

So why bother having a bigger brain?

One reason why large animals have larger brains may simply be that the electrical signals have to travel longer distances. For the signal to travel at a reasonable speed, you need larger neurons, which can carry signals faster than small neurons. So a whale has a large brain with big neurons because a signal has a long way to travel from one end of its body to the other.

Or maybe it is not the whole brain that needs to be bigger, but just one part of it. For instance, animals that have large home ranges, or cache food in thousands of places like a Clark's nutcracker, tend to have a relatively large hippocampus - the part of the brain involved in memory. They can remember more things than bees.

"In that case," says Chittka, "the increase in capacity might be just one of storage size - just as you might have a computer with a bigger hard drive but not necessarily a better processor. There are some things that a bigger brain might allow, but some of them might be fairly boring."

Bigger brains might just replicate the same circuits over and over, giving you more of the same behaviour - greater storage capacity, better acuity, more detail, precision, and finer resolution of responses - but not necessarily new computations or layers of complexity.

Chittka points out that sometimes, bigger brains certainly do mean more complexity - as in the case of our brains, for instance - but it is not automatically the case.

I think understanding at a basic level will take a long time, but I'm in a hurry

Humans tend to be a little defensive about their complex, big brains. Vivek says that people often say to him, "wait, you get paid to work with fruit flies?" They want to know what this can teach us about human cognition.

"People think that it's cool or cute," he says. "But it's more work to explain why it's important and what you can learn."

The message of his work is actually straightforward: if you want to learn how something complex works, start by studying something simple.

In this case "simple" is a relative term, because neurons and their connections are anything but simple. "But at least numerically, there are fewer neurons [in the fruit fly brain], it's compact, I can see a bunch of them at the same time," says Vivek. "And I have the tools to manipulate them and tinker with the different parts at will."

Because of this, he is able to address mechanistic questions that cannot yet be answered in bigger brains.

"I don't by any means think that this is the very end of how cognition is done," says Vivek. Instead, he thinks the relatively simple circuits he is studying are building blocks of cognition. "I think understanding at a basic level will take a long time, but I'm in a hurry - I want the answers in my lifetime!"

Bigger brains might just replicate the same circuits over and over, giving you more of the same behaviour

Chittka also sometimes laments the obsession with finding human-like abilities in other animals. "I find that a bit tedious and too narrow," he says.

The sensory abilities that insects have but humans do not - like sensitivity to ultraviolet, infrared, or polarised light, or an internal magnetic compass for navigating - are captivating on their own. Perhaps we could let go of looking at cognition in terms of human abilities.

"One of the very reasons I find insects fascinating is because they're so weird, so different, so non-human-like," Chittka says.

Surprises really do come in small packages.
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How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

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A bumblebee flies up to inspect a flower, looking for a taste of nectar. It buzzes around a bit and realises that something is different. The bee can see the flower but cannot reach it. That is because the "flower" - actually a blue plastic disc with sugar water in the centre - is sitting underneath a sheet of transparent plastic.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Detailed images of bumblebee brains reveal an accurate picture of brain structures associated with learning and memory.

Bumblebee brains have been visualised in unprecedented detail using new techniques in micro-CT imaging, allowing researchers to accurately measure tiny brain structures linked to surprisingly complex memory and learning abilities.

Whilst bumblebees have relatively simple brains compared to our own human brain, they are able to perform complex learning tasks, such as remembering the best places to forage for nectar and pollen.

Given their importance as pollinators for crops and wild flowers, understanding how damage to bees' brains affects their behaviour can help researchers understand what causes bee brains to malfunction.

Until now, scientists studying insect brains had to remove them and slice them up, causing damage to the structures and preventing accurate measurement of their size and shape.

However the new study, led by researchers from Imperial College London and published today in Scientific Reports, uses non-destructive techniques by applying micro-CT. The technique they use is similar to CT scanning of the human brain, but at a much higher resolution.

"It's a fantastic way to look inside insect brains. We can look at the brain as it naturally sits in the bee's head, without the human error of having to extract it," said Dr Richard Gill, one of the paper's authors from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial.

"The 3D structures can also be explored as you wish - from looking at the whole organ down to each separate structure, piece by piece."

Nice slices

Micro-CT scanning uses X-rays to provide hundreds of image slices of an object, in this case the bee's head. These slices can then be united to form a virtual 3D model in incredible resolution. Bee brains are less than two cubic millimetres in volume, which is only about 0.0002 per cent of the human brain.

The researchers teamed up with Dr Farah Ahmed who runs the micro-CT scanner facility at the Natural History Museum in London to help scan the brains of 19 bumblebees.

Bumblebees can be successfully kept in labs and given controlled behavioural tasks. The team hope to be able to use the micro-CT scanning technique to probe the brains of trained bumblebees to investigate the connection between behaviour and brain changes.

For example, changes in the size of certain brain structures, such as the so-called mushroom bodies found in insect brains, are thought to be linked to increased learning and memory abilities. Dylan Smith, the lead author also from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial said: "With older techniques, the sizes of these structures could not be accurately measured and compared between bees.

"The structures are so small that tiny errors in measurement can lead to wrong conclusions. This new technique allows structures to be isolated, examined, and measured in greater detail than ever before."

Brain trauma

The team also hope to be able to use the technique to study the effects of trauma on the brains of bees and whether certain influences affect the memory and learning centres, affecting their ability to forage and pollinate effectively.

"We know in humans that small differences in structures can lead to large effects on behaviour. We can now investigate whether even the most minimal deformations can have knock-on effects to behaviour in these simple brains," said Smith.

This sort of research requires accuracy but also the ability to reproduce results quickly and cost-effectively, which the team say can now be done, by combining micro-CT scanning with a 3D-rendering software that is freely available.

-

' Exploring miniature insect brains using micro-CT scanning techniques' by Dylan Smith, Galina Bernhardt, Nigel Raine, Richard Abel, Dan Sykes,Farah Ahmed, Inti Pedroso, & Richard Gill is published in Scientific Reports.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Bee brains as you have never seen them before

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Detailed images of bumblebee brains reveal an accurate picture of brain structures associated with learning and memory. Bumblebee brains have been visualised in unprecedented detail using new techniques in micro-CT imaging, allowing researchers to accurately measure tiny brain structures linked to surprisingly complex memory and learning abilities.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Detailed images of bumblebee brains reveal an accurate picture of brain structures associated with learning and memory.

Bumblebee brains have been visualised in unprecedented detail using new techniques in micro-CT imaging, allowing researchers to accurately measure tiny brain structures linked to surprisingly complex memory and learning abilities.

Whilst bumblebees have relatively simple brains compared to our own human brain, they are able to perform complex learning tasks, such as remembering the best places to forage for nectar and pollen.

Given their importance as pollinators for crops and wild flowers, understanding how damage to bees' brains affects their behaviour can help researchers understand what causes bee brains to malfunction.

Until now, scientists studying insect brains had to remove them and slice them up, causing damage to the structures and preventing accurate measurement of their size and shape.

However the new study, led by researchers from Imperial College London and published today in Scientific Reports, uses non-destructive techniques by applying micro-CT. The technique they use is similar to CT scanning of the human brain, but at a much higher resolution.

"It's a fantastic way to look inside insect brains. We can look at the brain as it naturally sits in the bee's head, without the human error of having to extract it," said Dr Richard Gill, one of the paper's authors from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial.

"The 3D structures can also be explored as you wish - from looking at the whole organ down to each separate structure, piece by piece."

Nice slices

Micro-CT scanning uses X-rays to provide hundreds of image slices of an object, in this case the bee's head. These slices can then be united to form a virtual 3D model in incredible resolution. Bee brains are less than two cubic millimetres in volume, which is only about 0.0002 per cent of the human brain.

The researchers teamed up with Dr Farah Ahmed who runs the micro-CT scanner facility at the Natural History Museum in London to help scan the brains of 19 bumblebees.

Bumblebees can be successfully kept in labs and given controlled behavioural tasks. The team hope to be able to use the micro-CT scanning technique to probe the brains of trained bumblebees to investigate the connection between behaviour and brain changes.

For example, changes in the size of certain brain structures, such as the so-called mushroom bodies found in insect brains, are thought to be linked to increased learning and memory abilities. Dylan Smith, the lead author also from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial said: "With older techniques, the sizes of these structures could not be accurately measured and compared between bees.

"The structures are so small that tiny errors in measurement can lead to wrong conclusions. This new technique allows structures to be isolated, examined, and measured in greater detail than ever before."

Brain trauma

The team also hope to be able to use the technique to study the effects of trauma on the brains of bees and whether certain influences affect the memory and learning centres, affecting their ability to forage and pollinate effectively.

"We know in humans that small differences in structures can lead to large effects on behaviour. We can now investigate whether even the most minimal deformations can have knock-on effects to behaviour in these simple brains," said Smith.

This sort of research requires accuracy but also the ability to reproduce results quickly and cost-effectively, which the team say can now be done, by combining micro-CT scanning with a 3D-rendering software that is freely available.

-

' Exploring miniature insect brains using micro-CT scanning techniques' by Dylan Smith, Galina Bernhardt, Nigel Raine, Richard Abel, Dan Sykes,Farah Ahmed, Inti Pedroso, & Richard Gill is published in Scientific Reports.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Bee brains as you have never seen them before

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Detailed images of bumblebee brains reveal an accurate picture of brain structures associated with learning and memory. Bumblebee brains have been visualised in unprecedented detail using new techniques in micro-CT imaging, allowing researchers to accurately measure tiny brain structures linked to surprisingly complex memory and learning abilities.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Detailed images of bumblebee brains reveal an accurate picture of brain structures associated with learning and memory.

Bumblebee brains have been visualised in unprecedented detail using new techniques in micro-CT imaging, allowing researchers to accurately measure tiny brain structures linked to surprisingly complex memory and learning abilities.

Whilst bumblebees have relatively simple brains compared to our own human brain, they are able to perform complex learning tasks, such as remembering the best places to forage for nectar and pollen.

Given their importance as pollinators for crops and wild flowers, understanding how damage to bees' brains affects their behaviour can help researchers understand what causes bee brains to malfunction.

Until now, scientists studying insect brains had to remove them and slice them up, causing damage to the structures and preventing accurate measurement of their size and shape.

However the new study, led by researchers from Imperial College London and published today in Scientific Reports, uses non-destructive techniques by applying micro-CT. The technique they use is similar to CT scanning of the human brain, but at a much higher resolution.

"It's a fantastic way to look inside insect brains. We can look at the brain as it naturally sits in the bee's head, without the human error of having to extract it," said Dr Richard Gill, one of the paper's authors from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial.

"The 3D structures can also be explored as you wish - from looking at the whole organ down to each separate structure, piece by piece."

Nice slices

Micro-CT scanning uses X-rays to provide hundreds of image slices of an object, in this case the bee's head. These slices can then be united to form a virtual 3D model in incredible resolution. Bee brains are less than two cubic millimetres in volume, which is only about 0.0002 per cent of the human brain.

The researchers teamed up with Dr Farah Ahmed who runs the micro-CT scanner facility at the Natural History Museum in London to help scan the brains of 19 bumblebees.

Bumblebees can be successfully kept in labs and given controlled behavioural tasks. The team hope to be able to use the micro-CT scanning technique to probe the brains of trained bumblebees to investigate the connection between behaviour and brain changes.

For example, changes in the size of certain brain structures, such as the so-called mushroom bodies found in insect brains, are thought to be linked to increased learning and memory abilities. Dylan Smith, the lead author also from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial said: "With older techniques, the sizes of these structures could not be accurately measured and compared between bees.

"The structures are so small that tiny errors in measurement can lead to wrong conclusions. This new technique allows structures to be isolated, examined, and measured in greater detail than ever before."

Brain trauma

The team also hope to be able to use the technique to study the effects of trauma on the brains of bees and whether certain influences affect the memory and learning centres, affecting their ability to forage and pollinate effectively.

"We know in humans that small differences in structures can lead to large effects on behaviour. We can now investigate whether even the most minimal deformations can have knock-on effects to behaviour in these simple brains," said Smith.

This sort of research requires accuracy but also the ability to reproduce results quickly and cost-effectively, which the team say can now be done, by combining micro-CT scanning with a 3D-rendering software that is freely available.

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' Exploring miniature insect brains using micro-CT scanning techniques' by Dylan Smith, Galina Bernhardt, Nigel Raine, Richard Abel, Dan Sykes,Farah Ahmed, Inti Pedroso, & Richard Gill is published in Scientific Reports.

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Bee brains as you have never seen them before

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Detailed images of bumblebee brains reveal an accurate picture of brain structures associated with learning and memory. Bumblebee brains have been visualised in unprecedented detail using new techniques in micro-CT imaging, allowing researchers to accurately measure tiny brain structures linked to surprisingly complex memory and learning abilities.

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Slide Show

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The network of nerves which transmit nerve impulses between parts of the body.

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When it comes time for honeybee swarm to split off from their mother colony and find a new place to live, something remarkable happens. To communicate most effectively, they organize themselves exactly like the neurons of a complex brain.

Sometimes, a honeybee colony grows too large, and so a swarm breaks off in order to find a possible new home, usually somewhere like a secure opening in a tree. Different bees check out different possible new homes, and those that have found a suitable landing site communicate this to the others by dancing, repeating a simple figure eight pattern that the other bees can interpret in order to know the direction and distance of their potential new home.

Time is of the essence here, since the entire swarm is exposed and vulnerable to the elements, and they're also missing out on crucial honey harvesting time. The problem is that scouts will often come back having found multiple good sites, and so the swarm has to very quickly decide which of these options is the best one. They can't afford to spend too much time deliberating, but at the same a bad choice could wipe out the entire colony.

Researchers P. Kirk Visscher of UC Riverside and Thomas Seeley of Cornell have discovered a crucial way in which bees come to these decisions as quickly as possible, and it actually precisely mimics what goes on with neurons in the complex brains of humans and other primates.

While the house hunting bees continue their figure eight dance, a different set of bees known as sender scouts will sometimes give them a "stop signal", which is a short buzz punctuated by the sender butting her head against the dancer. This makes the dancing bee stop moving, and it allows the swarm to stop focusing on this repeated information and come to a better decision. Monkeys' brains send out similar signals to inhibit their neurons while making decisions. Visscher comments on this similarity:

"It appears that the stop signals in bee swarms serve the same purpose as the inhibitory connections in the brains of monkeys deciding how to move their eyes in response to visual input. In one case we have bees and in the other we have neurons that suppress the activity levels of units - dancing bees or nerve centers - that are representing different alternatives. Bee behavior can shed some light on general issues of decision making. Bees are a lot bigger than neurons for sure, and may be easier to study!"

This phenomenon, known as cross inhibition, serves precisely the same function with bees that it does in nervous systems. It's a way of avoiding decision-making deadlock when presented with a set of equally viable alternatives. Visscher explains:

"The message the sender scout is conveying to the dancer appears to be that the dancer should curb her enthusiasm, because there is another nest site worthy of consideration. Such an inhibitory signal is not necessarily hostile. It's simply saying, 'Wait a minute, here's something else to consider, so let's not be hasty in recruiting every bee to a site that may not be the best one for the swarm. All the bees have a common interest in choosing the best available site. This is critical, because the swarm must choose a single nest site, even if two sites of equal quality are available. This cross inhibition curtails the production of waggle dances for, and thus the recruitment of bees to, a competing site."

For honeybees to choose a new home, a given site must attract a certain number of scout bees. Once it becomes clear that a "quorum" of scouts have settled on a single place, a piping signal goes through the swarm, telling the rest of the bees to prepare to fly. This is also where another round of stopping signals are sent to the dancing scouts, both those for and against the chosen site. Visscher explains:

"Apparently at this point, the message of the stop signal changes, and can be thought of as, 'Stop dancing, it is time to get ready for the swarm to fly.' It is important for the scouts to be with the swarm when it takes off, because they are responsible for guiding the flight to the nest site."

While we don't yet know just how precisely honeybees mimic our neurons, it's a fascinating reminder of how a lot of the same basic structures can be found throughout nature, even in two groups as completely dissimilar as a swarm of honeybees and the neurons of the primate brain. This is quite possibly the craziest example yet of convergent evolution, if nothing else.
Via Science Express. Image by kaibara87 on Flickr.

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Bee swarms behave just like neurons in the human brain

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When it comes time for honeybee swarm to split off from their mother colony and find a new place to live, something remarkable happens. To communicate most effectively, they organize themselves exactly like the neurons of a complex brain.

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5 Things About Bees That Will Amaze You | Bee America

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When older bees are tasked to do jobs typically performed by younger bees, their brains not only stop aging, but also had a greater ability to learn new things. Additionally, the brains of these older bees produced proteins only seen in the brains of younger bees.

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Bees routinely solve the advanced mathematical problem of the travelling salesman. Bees mix medications for their hive and know when a fungus is dangerous. Bees distinguish landscapes scenes, types of flowers, shapes and patterns. Bees forage for information. Bees learn categories, sequences, combinations, and the changes of future rewards. All of these are accomplished by INDIVIDUAL bees, not hives.
How can such a small insect be able to think abstractly? Yet, this is exactly what a new study showed. Using concepts "above/below" and "difference" it demonstrated that bees can handle two different abstract concepts at the same time and make decisions based on these in new situations.

Previous posts described the very complex symbolic language of the waggle dance, and bees' remarkable ability to solve the advanced mathematical question of the shortest distance between many objects. Bees also distinguish dangerous fungi from harmless ones. They mix medicine called propolis and bring more when dangerous fungus infected their hive. When harmless spores were placed in the hive, the bees removed the spores but did not spread propolis. Bees, amazingly can remember route details up to six miles over several days.
How can we explain such remarkable cognitive capacities with a tiny brain?
The Bee's Brain: Hardwired or Neuroplastic

Observing humans rapid neuroplastic responses to experience, scientists have assumed that learning and plasticity depend upon the complexity of human brain. Most scientists have therefore assumed that advanced behavior in creatures with very small brains, such as the bee, must be "hard wired" rather than responsive and changeable.

While it is possible that some small-brained insects are hard wired, bees do not appear to be. Perhaps, this conclusion is based upon the much greater number of studies of the bees' brain compared with other insects. It is possible that in the future other insects will be noted to have the neuronal changes of neuroplasticity.
In fact, recent research convincingly demonstrates that individual bees are crucial for the functioning and decision making of the hive. The bee has individual memories related to experiences both in the hive and outside. Individual bees are able to evaluate timing of events, spatial arrangements and communication from other bees in comparison to their own personal experience.
Insect Nervous Systems

All insects have a brain and a series of neuron ganglia in the chest and abdomen. They have sensory nerves at two levels, that is, a sensory nerve going to a ganglia where there is a synapse then another neuron to the brain. Insects also have two layers of neurons for movement, a descending pre motor neurons, and motor neurons. There are also interneurons in the brain.

The bee's brain is large compared with other insects, (fruit flies being 50 times smaller with a tenth of the neurons). Bees have more elaborate visual systems and mushroom bodies, which perform integration of multiple senses. The mushroom bodies that integrate multiple senses are 20% of the brain volume with 200,000 neurons. (flies' mushroom bodies consist of 2% of the brain volume with 2500 mainly smell neurons)

The Virtual Atlas of the Honeybee Brain website shows the complexity of the bee brain with advanced central processing. Research has catalogued 40 different specific neurons. With advanced imaging it has been shown that one neuron can influence specific cognitive functions, mediating reward-based learning. This particular nerve VUMmx1 takes data from the antenna, the integrating mushroom body, and other lateral regions, learns about a new sucrose odor and an unpredicted reward. This type of neuron functioning resembles specific human dopamine neurons and shows advanced neuronal communication. This research has proven that bees' brains have multiple different places for memory.

Learning and memory

Despite attempts to consider bees in behaviorist terms, honeybee learning is much more complex than traditional classical and operant conditioning.

The life of the honeybee is short, and the hive's life is very long. Therefore, individual bees cannot be programmed to know locations, qualities of flowers and hive sites. Their observational learning is very advanced and beyond most other insects. Bees rapidly learn visual, smell, taste, and touch information in any foraging neighborhood. Bees are able to generalize about types of sites beyond simple categories. Visual information is not filtered but is part of the general central function of the brain. The bee is able to abstract from all of the sensory information.

It has been shown that bees take into account social conditions, time of day, location, and the different sensory stimuli and appear to show integrated memory of all of these characteristics. Bees are able to count scenes and therefore can remember the way through mazes and through complex outdoor scenes. This property has led scientists to consider that bees can count. Bees have demonstrated short-term memory in mazes and long term memory (several minutes) in rewards. Bees have also demonstrated memory over days, and their entire lifespan (weeks in summer bees and months in winter bees).

Neuroplastic changes (see post on How Neuroplasticity Works) have been observed for specific dendritic spine activity in the mushroom bodies during learning. The hundreds of thousands of mushroom body neurons synapse onto one hundred neurons, which then code the specific multi sensory learned stimulus combinations.
The mushroom body appears to act like a combination of the human hippocampus and the cortex changing sensory information into value based information. This advanced brain integration of the signals develops a memory over time, increasing ability to navigate in different situations as well as ongoing evaluation.
Aging in Bees

Sixty thousand workers are daughters of one queen. They seem to emerge without genetic predispositions, with very plastic abilities to adapt to different jobs. These adaptations often occur through epigenetic mechanisms of learning most often through smell.

As bees age they have a cognitive decline and reduced ability to handle stress. Strangely, this aging is immediately reversed if the colony "swarms", which is when the hive divides into two. Another way bees become young again is when young nurse bees are removed. Specific proteins have been identified related to this sudden ability of old bees to act young. Is this a fountain of youth for mammals as well? Intense research is now beginning on this question.

Winter bees do not have aging when they live for months without foraging. It appears that the demands of foraging are a stimulus to aging. Epigenetic changes are also involved in aging processes.

Food And Information Foragers

Most bees forage for food. A smaller group of bees are selected to forage for information as scouts, searching for new food regions and new nest sites. The queen is able to manipulate the choice of bees for these different tasks of caring for the young, scouting and food foraging through use of pheromones.
Communication for foraging occurs in the waggle language encoding distance, direction, and qualities of the available food or next site. The type of food is signaled by the odor on the dancing bee. Distance is described in the speed of the rounds of the dance; direction of the outbound flight relative to the sun is related to the angle of the waggle to gravity.
Other bees carefully observe the dance and learn from it. The information is integrated into specialized spatial memory to allow for new shortcuts to high quality flower targets. Bees start foraging near the hive, and then use the information to find more distance flowers. This advanced language of spatial locations doesn't exist in any other animal.

Before bees start foraging they first explore the region, examining the relation to the sun, spatial relations to landmarks, local conditions and the hive. Only then do they carry out extended trips for food. A young bee who has not previously experienced the specific new flower smell demonstrated in the waggle dance will leave early on and go to familiar sites looking for that new flower type. If that search is exhausted they will return to the waggle dance and learn how to fly to the new locations.
The bees are so capable in remembering locations that when they have exhausted their current location they remember short cuts to the new locations described in the waggle dance. Bees are able to remember a map of multiple locations, whereby they can navigate on the waggle information without knowing specific landmarks or visual scenes. In mammals some of this type of information exists in place grids and head direction cells in the hippocampus. How the bee can do this in their much smaller brain is not clear.
Conclusion
Bees demonstrate abstract thought, symbolic language, advanced visual perception, neuronal neuroplastic changes, decision-making, and planning. They learn through symbolic language and transfer these memories to specific spatial abilities including the ability to find the shortest distances between many different types of scenes and flowers. They can count, sequence, and combine concepts.
These capacities are in the individual bee, with a very small brain, one million neurons, versus humans 100 billion. This intelligence is in the individual bee not a mysterious "hive intelligence" (used to explain away their individual capacities) anymore than our intelligence is in the internet or society. With such advanced capacities in bees, as well as cognitive abilities in microbes, intelligence and mind in nature must be reconsidered.

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The Remarkable Bee Brain | Jon Lieff, M.D.

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Bees routinely solve the advanced mathematical problem of the travelling salesman. Bees mix medications for their hive and know when a fungus is dangerous. Bees distinguish landscapes scenes, types of flowers, shapes and patterns. Bees forage for information. Bees learn categories, sequences, combinations, and the changes of future rewards.

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Almost no other insect has helped humans as much as the honey bee has and continues to do.

For hundreds of years, beekeepers have raised them, harvested their wonderful sweet honey, and relied on them to pollinate various crops.

Did you know that honey bees actually pollinate nearly one-third of the food crops in the world?

The Honey Bee Brain Is Tiny But Very Powerful

In spite of their small brain sizes, honey bees are very smart. Bees have a remarkable ability to learn and recall things very quickly.

Their brains are about 20,000 times less massive compared to human brains.

The honey bee brain is actually ten times denser compared to a mammal's brain.

The honey bee brain has an oval shape and is about the size of one sesame seed.

The bee brain is a very sophisticated sensory system which gives them excellent sight and smell abilities.

Their small brains are able to make very complicated calculations on distances for different locations.

Bees can remember various colors and different landmarks quite easily.

In Australia, researchers were able to successfully teach honey bees to identify several different colors. The bees were shown a color that was used to indicate a specific path in a maze. The bees were then able to find their way through the maze because they recognized that color.

They were also able to recall that specific color later on, and they use it to guide their way through the maze even when they weren't shown it at the start of the maze.

Honey Bees Have A Very Complex Brain And Language System

Bee brains work at a far superior rate to many highly advanced computers.

The most advanced computers can easily figure out 16 billion computations in one second.

The honey bee brain can figure out about 10 trillion in a second, which is 625 times greater than what the advanced computers can do.

A honey bee has 960,000 neurons in its brain.

Their brain's measure just one tiny cubic millimeter, which they use very intelligently.

Worker bees have to handle various roles in their lives.

Foragers have to find flowers, figure out if they are a good source food, find their way back to the hive, and then share all of that detailed information with other foragers.

Honey bees can quickly remember various locations by smell.

Studies showed that bees can go back to a place that had a particular smell when that identical odor was released in their hive.

These bees communicate with each other using their special language code that is called the "waggle" dance.

Their dance pattern looks very much like a figure eight.

Research studies have revealed that honey bees did their best learning in the morning.

This turns out to be very beneficial to honey bees because flower nectar levels are very high in the morning.

When bees get their difficult learning done in the morning, they are able to save some energy for their easier tasks for later on in the day.

Unfortunately, many pesticides that farmers use to protect their crops are very harmful to the honey bee.

These dangerous chemicals can scramble the honey bee's brain circuitry.

Research revealed that the learning circuits of honey bees stopped working very quickly when they were exposed to certain pesticides.

This clearly shows that something has to be done to protect the valuable lives of honey bees if we want to continue to eat the various the crops they pollinate.

Honey bee Life Cycle - Honey bee life cycle has four main distinct stages or phases, egg, larva, pupa and finally an adult. Honey bee colonies are generally perennial with the exceptions of bumble bee and paper wasp colonies.

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Fascinating Facts About The Honey Bee Brain

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Almost no other insect has helped humans as much as the honey bee has and continues to do. For hundreds of years, beekeepers have raised them, harvested their wonderful sweet honey, and relied on them to pollinate various crops. Did you know that honey bees actually pollinate nearly one-third of the food crops in the world?

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One of Linnaeus's criteria for erecting his Insecta group was that they had no brain. It's not hard to see why he would classify them like that. Decapitated insects will still execute the same behaviour. Buffon, one of the great naturalists of the eighteenth century, wrote that "the hippobosca, equina, or horsefly, will live, run, nay, even copulate, after being deprived of its head." Drosophila flies live for several days completely normally without a head: they will fly, walk and copulate (okay, they have to be raped since a headless female won't start courting rituals). Mantids, however, do start their mating dance when beheaded. Long-term memory in cockroaches will stay even when the head is removed. It seems amazing at first, but it's really quite clear how this all works when you look at an insect's central nervous system (CNS).

The brain of any animal is part of its CNS. Vertebrates have a brain comprised of many regions in the head, and a dorsal nerve cord running down the body in the spine. The insect CNS is somewhat different: the nerve cord is ventral with a ganglion in each segment of the body. The head contains two ganglia: a supraesophagal and a subesophagal ganglion. When referring to the insect brain, we usually mean the supraesophagal ganglion (also called the anterior brain; from now on, just brain). Just as background, ganglia are bundles of neurons packed together.

Of course, it should always be kept in mind that the insects are the most diverse group of animals, and this is also seen in their CNS arrangements and in their brain structures. The brains of insects are exceptionally malleable, and they can vary even within species (this is best seen in eusocial insects like ants or bees, where members of different castes have different-looking brains). Nevertheless, they are all variations of the same ground plan.

The brain is made up of three regions: the protocerebrum (PC), deuterocerebrum (DC) and tritocerebrum (TC). The PC is by far the largest region and contains the mushroom bodies, the pars intercerebralis, the central complex and the lateral accessory lobes. Two very prominent optical lobes are present, and they are responsible for processing the inputs from the eyes. They are attached to the PC, but they're not part of it. The DC contains the antennal lobes, which process the information coming from the antennae. The TC is the smallest part of the brain, and is also the least studied - it may have a function in tasting food. The total number of neurons varies with each insect, but Drosophila has around 100000, while a regular honey bee has ~1000000.

Let's look at what are frequently called the "higher" brain centers: the mushroom bodies and the central complex in the PC.

The mushroom bodies are a pair of neuropils (bunch of neurons). In the honeybee, there are ~340000 neurons in them - making up a significant portion of the bee brain. They're made up of three regions: the calices (Ca), the peduncle and the alpha and beta lobes. The structural organisation of the neuronal cells in the mushroom bodies is unique (in fact, they're given their own name: Kenyon cells). The calices serve as the input areas, the peduncle is the 'transfer region' and the lobes are the output region.

In most insect species, the mushroom bodies primarily recieve olfactory inputs: Odourant information is relayed from the olfactory receptors, through the antennal lobes and into the calices. In the case of cockroaches and locusts, tactile (touch) and gustatory (taste) inputs are also found. Bees and wasps, which are predominantly visual insects, have two exceptionally large optical lobes connected to the calyces.

The diversity of insect brains is most apparent in the mushroom bodies, since they are often compartmentalised, with each compartment dedicated to each input. The functional output of mushroom bodies is still a matter of debate. They are mostly involved in sorting out information from the different sensory inputs, since there is little evidence of any direct downstream connection to other brain areas. They may be involved in pattern recognition, as in locusts, where specific Kenyon cells activate depending on specific smells.

But the coolest function they have is in learning. It's no secret that insects are smart and have considerable memorisation ability. Manipulating the mushroom bodies (not allowing them to develop properly) has always resulted in loss of short- and long-term memory. There is a strong correlation between mushroom body size and memory in hymenopterans (bees, wasps, ants) as well as between size of the mushroom bodies and behavioural complexity. The reason for this is the Kenyon cells' remarkable plasticity, in that they will readily rebuild the neural fibers, acting as a sort of neural substrate on which new memories can grow.

In contrast to the mushroom bodies, we don't know that much about the central complex. It forms a line in the middle of the brain, and is made up of four interconnected regions: the protocerebral bridge, the center body (which has a lower and upper part), and the noduli. It's connected to almost all other PC regions, with the noteable exception of the mushroom bodies.

In locusts and bees, the compound eyes directly connect to the protocerebral bridge. The ocelli are also innervated by the central complex, and there seems to be a strong connection to the pathway responsible for polarised vision. That said, blind insects also have strongly developed central complexes, so they must have some other role.

In locusts, it's connected to the ventral cord, suggesting a role in movement. This is an interesting proposition, given that it's right between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and it's further supported by the fact that those insects that can perform complex, asymmetrical leg movements (like weaving silk threads) have highly-developed central complexes.

There is also the possibility of the central complex playing a vital role in behaviour, since neural activity there is always correlated with the expression of specific behaviours. For example, changes in activity levels are seen at the start and end of flight in locusts. This is not limited to just walking and flying, but also includes visual searches.

The most definite proof comes when central complex development is suppressed. In Drosophila, this leads to inability to fly and strange walking, indicating that while it is not necessary for initiating leg movement, it is needed for control. If only the central part of the central complex is disrupted, the fly has difficulty orienting itself and cannot deal with asymmetries: they can't fly in a straight line, for example.

Combined with their likely role in the visual system, there is also a chance that they are integral for insects to calculate their travel paths, especially in migrating insects like the locust. Locusts have a very well-developed polarised light detection system. They see polarised light in the sky and use it as a compass to guide them on their journey.

The subesophagal ganglion (also called the posterior brain) is made up of three fused segments and is responsible for controlling the mouthparts (mandibles, maxillae and labium), and has a dorsal lobe for connecting the anterior brain to the rest of the CNS.

The thoracic ganglia are not only responsible for controlling the appendages (wings, legs, etc.) but also collect information from the environment (wind strength, sound), and relay these back to the brain.

This is a decentralised system: the brain doesn't control everything in an insect. Mating and moving are jobs for the body's ventral nerve cord, and the ganglia can store information. This explains the examples I mentioned at the start.

One of the most painfully idiotic myths surrounding insects is that their behaviour is limited, compared to animals of "higher intelligence". This is not true. Insects have many sensory inputs: their antennae let them feel and smell; they have hundreds of eyes; their body is covered in hair that lets them feel the wind. All these inputs come together and the insect has to decide what it will do. If they move and the smell of food gets weaker, they change direction. They regulate their wings' flapping depending on the wind speed. They will learn where there is a plentiful source of food and they will learn how best to capture that specific type of prey. These are not predetermined behaviours, they are learned from experience.

Ants can travel very long distances in search of food, but still come back to their nests. They do this by counting their steps and by memorising landmarks. Some insects will fly over landscapes taking mental snapshots of where they are so they can find their way back. Bees can recognise specific patterns, which helps in reminding them which flowers are cool or for recognising predators. Insects can manipulate their environment and make tools, as anyone who has observed ants can see.

But detractors will say that their behaviour is predictable (as if that's an indication of animal cognition!) It's true that insect behaviour can be seen as being hard-wired: pheromone-induced behaviour is a prime example of an insect going through predetermined steps. Escape mechanisms are another one: blow on an insect's wind-flow detectors (this is most amusingly done with cockroaches by blowing on their cerci) and it will have a reflex reaction similar to what happens when you put your hand on a hot plate: you don't think, your hand just moves away by itself.

But looking at insect behavior like this is deceptive, because the very same can be said of any other animal, even us amazing humans </sarcasm>. It's a drastic simplification and belies the complexity of insect behaviour. Insects fly and have to stabilise their vision so that they know where they're going. This is also an automatic action, just like your eyes automatically focus depending on how far you're looking. But the amount of information that goes into gaze-stabilisation is enormous, and it comes from multiple sources: the compound eyes detect vision; the ocelli detect light intensity; the halteres detect the body's position; hairs detect the wind speed. All this goes through the relatively tiny nervous system of the fly and the brain adjusts the head.

And even so, not all insect behaviour is just like letting a program run. Honeybees have an elaborate dance language, and no two dances are the same: the dance depends on distance and orientation, and changes dynamically.

The problem most people have with insect behaviour is that it's very polarising. On the one hand, there is the characteristic very inflexible, hard-wired behaviour we all know of, but there is also the startling ability to learn. Damselflies will always fly upside down when the light comes from below, but they will flawlessly fly through a complex maze and memorise its layout.

Let's look at true sociality, which is a purely entomological innovation (among the vertebrates, only naked mole rats are eusocial; humans don't come close.) Not only is it an example of insect intelligence (recognising and learning from nestmates), but look at the elaborate architecture of a hornet nest, the climate control in a termite colony, the symbolic communication in bees, the chemical communication systems in wasps, ants making slaves, farming and waging wars. All these are achieved with less than a million neurons.

This brings us to the concept of intelligence. What can be used as an indicator of intelligence? Whale brains weigh 9 kg and have over 200 billion neurons. Human brains weigh between 1 and 1.5 kg, with around 80 billion neurons. A honeybee brain is 1 mm³ and has less than a million neurons. Brain size, therefore, is not a good predictor of intelligence, if it's measured by behavioural repertoire, innovativeness or sociality. In any of those examples, a honeybee will come out as more intelligent than a human or a whale.

How about learning speed? Again, a bee will beat out a human (and any other vertebrate), even when the life spans are equalised. This is an example of how difficult it is to quantify intelligence. I'm not saying bees are the most intelligent animals, but if you reduce it down to a mere statistic, they will come out on top simply because of the radically different nature of the brains in vertebrates and insects.

There is no unique feature of vertebrate intelligence that isn't found in insects. Vertebrates can memorise places, insects can too. Both have a sense of time. Both can call on past experience to make future judgements (as in: I came here at 3 oclock yesterday and ate a delicious aphid. I'll do it again today!) Learning rules? No problem! Categorising and sorting out information? Again, found in both groups. Even Pavlov's dog experiment, which has traditionally been cited as a vertebrate-only type of response (salivating in expectation of food), has been replicated in a cockroach. It seems there isn't much that vertebrates, with their relatively enormous brains, can do that insects can't. Why?

Having a large brain does not add any capabilities, it just improves the resolution. Think of a computer: you can have a a dual core CPU, but it won't bring you much if you're only running Windows 98 and Minesweeper on it. Complexity is not a matter of power (i.e. number of neurons), but the ability to do more things. In terms of behaviour, a honeybee is in a completely respectable position, according to how ethologists classify behaviour. Insects range from between 15 to 59 (the number rising with level of sociality). Dolphins have 123.

The honeybee scores 59: that means it is capable of 59 distinct behaviours, including building specifically-shaped honeycombs, manipulating pollen to stick them on their body, various dances as a means of communication, decieving its enemies in active combat, cleaning the nest and even warming its fellow nestmates by shivering (sharing body heat). A large mammal has a brain size that's a million times larger than a bee's. Yet they can only do two to three times more of the same kinds of behaviour. Not quite what one would expect, even if we accept the limitation of such ethograms.

What about memory? Humans can store a virtually unlimited amount of pictures, which is not that impressive, considering that birds with much smaller brains can memorise the locations of thousands of food stores. There aren't any studies that have determined an upper limit for insect long-term memory. Bees can memorise at least six locations, and three paths leading to each. They can remember at least four good choices and four bad choices. These memories are not just visual; they can also remember them by smell, and the overall memory is often a mixture of smell, location and colour. Of course, considering that memory capacity is directly linked to brain size (more neural substrate), we cannot directly compare insect and vertebrate memory capacity.

Is it really so surprising that insects have such advanced cognitive capabilities? No. A brain with a volume less than a millionth the size of a human's might seem unable to perform complex operations (because of that horrible generalisation the vertebrate people have been putting out about relative brain size and cognition). In fact, insect cognition is so advanced because of the brain's miniaturisation, not despite of it. They do not collect information by quantity, but by quality (in the visual system's case, a greater range of light frequencies and all sorts of edge-detection and pattern recognition systems, but at the price of resolution and clarity). This requires less neurons, but gives much more flexibility and information.

This, however, is not as advantageous as it seems. It's unlikely that we will find insects that have flexible tool use, that are insightful or that have some sort of theory of the mind. Then again, the 10 g brain of a corvid bird can achieve the same types of cognition of a great ape. Again, this speaks against the whole relative brain size as a measure for intelligence. But it's important not to get too extreme in dismissing that notion. Expecting selection to produce any desirable degree of cognitive capacity independent of brain size, and dependent only on ecological factors, is a silly mindset. What I've been trying to say through this section is that it's not the size of the tissue that matters, it's the type of circuitry - and this circuitry cannot be miniaturised to an unlimited degree.

Now let's go back to the mushroom bodies, since they seem to be most implicated in the effect of lifestyle on cognition and learning. Like the mammalian cortex, the mushroom bodies are compartmentalised into modules; the larger the mushroom body, the more modules there are. And here we can make an interesting observation. Scarab beetles, which are generalists, have larger mushroom bodies with more compartments than even honeybees and flies (who are more specialised in their ecology). More compartments mean more chances of new interconnections, and therefore new cognitive abilities - and this is directly related to the scarabs' ecology. A similar effect can be seen in humans, comparing them to other primates: our neocortex has developed connections to the motor neurons that control the vocal machinery, and this is what leads to language (our major cognitive innovation). Non-human primates do not have this neural connection.

And this leads to a realisation that every biologist interested in this field has to understand, and one that I've brought up several times. Correlating overall brain size and cognition is pointless, since an increase in brain size is simply an increase in processing power needed for supporting a larger organism. It will not lead to higher intelligence. A Caenorhabditis elegans worm, with its 302 neurons, is capable of learning. This is not a marvelous fact - it's to be expected. The real surprise comes from the fact that so many animals have such large brains! All the basic components of neurons are present in vertebrates and insects, and are probably shared from their last common ancestor. Cognitive ability does not come from new types of neurons, or just more neurons. It is new links between different bundles of neurons that lead to tangible changes in behaviour: to understand the brain, we don't look at the size of it, but at how its different components interact.

And as many of you have wondered why I have such an insect brain fetish, but I didn't really explain it in the post, here's an elegant quote.

"It is certain that there may be extraordinary activity with an extremely small absolute mass of nervous matter; thus the wonderfully diversified instincts, mental powers, and affections of ants are notorious, yet their cerebral ganglia are not so large as the quarter of a small pin's head. Under this point of view, the brain of an ant is one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of man."
- Charles Darwin, 1871.

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Insect Brains and Animal Intelligence | Teaching Biology

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One of Linnaeus's criteria for erecting his Insecta group was that they had no brain. It's not hard to see why he would classify them like that. Decapitated insects will still execute the same behaviour. Buffon, one of the great naturalists of the eighteenth century, wrote that "the hippobosca, equina, or horsefly, will live, run, nay, even copulate, after being deprived of its head."

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Here is a conundrum: Insects have microscopically tiny brains and yet manage some astonishingly intelligent behaviors. Human brains, on the other hand, are massive enough to make our heads fall forward onto our desks, and yet we seem to use them mainly to find new ways to be stupid. (I am going on personal experience here.)

Honeybees, for instance, have only a million neurons in their brains, versus an estimated 85 billion neurons in a human brain. And yet the bees in a colony have to forage over an area of several square kilometers, according to the authors of a 2009 study in Current Biology, memorizing the location of flowers, sorting out which ones are more rewarding at particular times of day, then linking them in a flight pattern that's stable and repeatable. It requires "learning landmark sequences and linking vector instructions to landmarks," as well as "cognitive abilities previously attributed exclusively to 'higher' vertebrates, including, for example, simple forms of rule learning and categorization." Meanwhile, on a typical morning the average human is still struggling to lift that massive brain off the pillow.

A honeybee must manage its daily foraging even when it isn't driven by hunger, because its job is to gather nectar not just for itself but for the entire colony. When it comes back to the hive, fully burdened, it may need to do a waggle dance to communicate the location of a new food source to its mates. Having done all this, it may also need to tend to the housework-building, maintaining, and defending a large, complex hive.

So how do they manage it? For a new study in the Journal of Experimental Biology, Vivek Nityananda and his coauthors set up a chamber with six tiny perches, three of them containing the sugar reward honeybees crave and three containing quinine, which makes honeybees gag. To find the reward, a bee had to choose among the signals posted behind each perch. That could mean recognizing that a simple diagonal line indicated sugar, or it might entail distinguishing between two similar colors or shapes-one for sugar, the other for quinine. Just to keep things interesting, the researchers flashed these signals briefly on an LCD computer screen for 100 milliseconds, 50 milliseconds, or 25 milliseconds.

With the simple diagonal, the bees did just fine at finding the sugar, even when they had only 25 milliseconds to make their choice. But with the more complicated signals, they were befuddled at high speed. Humans and monkeys, by contrast, are capable of "ultra-fast categorization" of complex scenes, even with a glance lasting just six milliseconds. In other words, we win. (Just don't ask us to find the honey.)

The difference suggests something about how our brains and theirs work.

We can take a single snapshot of a scene, then analyze it "off-line," using the parallel processing powers of our larger brains. Insects don't have that capacity, so they need to do their analysis by continuous "on-line" sampling of the scene. When approaching a target, a bee has to engage in "systematic side to side scanning movements" of its entire body, a behavior known as "peering." Bees that are immobilized become visually impaired.

"Bees can see images quickly, and store them in memory," writes Jamie Theobald, a biologist at Florida International University, "but may be required to physically move their eyes around in order to explore the subtle spatial content. This is a limitation, but may better accommodate an insect brain." Sampling one slice of an image at a time may be "an important strategy that allows bees to solve complex visual problems" through serial processing, even though they lack the brain capacity to analyze a whole stored image through parallel processing.

The new study doesn't tell the whole story, though. We still don't know how honeybees map out those complex foraging routes. What we know is impressive enough, and it reminds us that being really smart-"I'm a member of Mensa International," "I scored genius level on the IQ test," "I had a perfect score on the SAT"-isn't something to brag about.

What matters is how you use what you've got.

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How Honeybees Use Their Tiny Brains to Do Big Things

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Here is a conundrum: Insects have microscopically tiny brains and yet manage some astonishingly intelligent behaviors. Human brains, on the other hand, are massive enough to make our heads fall forward onto our desks, and yet we seem to use them mainly to find new ways to be stupid.

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Bee brains challenge view that larger brains are superior at understanding conceptual relationships

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(Phys.org) -The humble honeybee may not seem very intelligent at first sight, but recent research has shown that it possesses a surprising degree of sophistication that is not expected in an insect brain. Specifically, ...

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Honey bee reveals insights into workings of human brain | myVMC

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Two new research papers from Monash University researchers reveal the way the honey bee controls aggression and form memories. The discoveries have important implications for the way the human brain controls aggression and forms memories, and loses memory with age.

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Bees Can Be Trained To Score Goals By Scientist

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Bees Can Be Trained To Score Goals By Scientist

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Insects that observed the success of other bees were better at learning the task than those given the "ghost" demonstration.

Project leader Professor Lars Chittka, from Queen Mary, University of London's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, said: "Our study puts the final nail in the coffin of the idea that small brains constrain insects to have limited behavioural flexibility and only simple learning abilities."

The bees did not simply copy exactly what they saw, but figured out their own way to get the ball to the right destination.

"This shows an impressive amount of cognitive flexibility, especially for an insect," said Dr Olli Loukola, another member of the Queen Mary team.

During the tests, the bees had to roll a ball from the edge of the platform to the centre.

Initially, "demonstrator" bees were trained by watching a plastic bee pushing the ball to the goal.

They then moved the ball in front of other bees undergoing training, who quickly learned the same trick.

But in later trials "observer" bees faced with a choice of three balls made a beeline for the one closest to the goal, rather than the one at the platform edge.

In yet another test they had to move a differently coloured ball to earn the reward.

Dr Loukola said: "It may be that bumblebees, along with many other animals, have the cognitive capabilities to solve such complex tasks, but will only do so if environmental pressures are applied to necessitate such behaviours."

The research is described in the latest issue of the journal Science.

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Bumble bees found to have 'impressive' brain power as they are trained to score 'goals' by scientists

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Insects that observed the success of other bees were better at learning the task than those given the "ghost" demonstration. Project leader Professor Lars Chittka, from Queen Mary, University of London's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, said: "Our study puts the final nail in the coffin of the idea that small brains constrain insects to have limited behavioural flexibility and only simple learning abilities."

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Updated July 05, 2017 15:58:56

Scientists investigating how bees see colours say the insect's highly efficient visual system could revolutionise the way robots and drones view the world.

The way humans see colour is heavily affected by the changing light around them, such as during a sunset or in the middle of the night, but bees see the same colour regardless.

The Melbourne-based team has studied how bees solve this problem, by using three special eyes on top of their head, in addition to two main eyes at the front.

"The three eyes point skyward, and they directly sample the colour of the light above us," Dr Adrian Dyer of RMIT University said.

"If it's a sunny day or a cloudy day, [those three eyes] can detect that.

"It means their brain knows what kind of lighting conditions they are in and then, when they are looking directly at a flower, they can say, 'Ah, it's a blue sky day, so the correct colour should appear like this, or if it's a cloudy day it should appear like something else.'"

This ability is vital to bees, as it allows them to find the best flowers to collect food to take back to their hive.

The team discovered that the three eyes on top of the bee's head, called ocelli, contain two colour receptors that are perfectly tuned for sensing the colour of ambient light.

The information from the ocelli is integrated with the colours seen by the two front eyes.

To prove this was happening, the researchers mapped "neural tracings" sent from the ocelli, showing they feed into the areas of the bee's brain that processes colours.

The project was completed by a joint team from RMIT University, Monash University, University of Melbourne and Deakin University and their findings will be published today in the scientific journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Technology to copy the bees

Just as humans cannot see colours reliably, because the light around us changes, cameras, robots and drones have the same problem.

Dr Dyer said this long-running conundrum has held back the advance of technology to perform a range of tasks.

"This is a very big problem for machine vision - how to make reliable decisions when the colour of the light changes," he said.

"So our study looked at how bees solve the problem."

The team discovered the mathematical principals used within a bee's brain to process data collected by the three top eyes about the surrounding light and make an adjustment for what the two main eyes are seeing in front of the bee.

The mathematical formula can be easily programmed into a computer.

One example of how the technology could be used is in horticulture.

Drones could fly around an orchard, possibly at night, and accurately detect the colour of different fruits to determine whether they are ready for picking.

The manager can then make accurate decisions about how to deploy his workforce.

This more accurate ability to analyse colour could also be used by drones to inspect infrastructure, such as bridges, or to analyse mineral sands.

"These ideas have been around for a while, but the problem has been how to judge colour accurately," Dr Dyer said.

The project was supported by an grant from the Australian Research Council.

Topics: science-and-technology, animal-science, invertebrates---insects-and-arachnids, photography, research, melbourne-3000

First posted July 04, 2017 06:15:46

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How bees' eyes could be used to revolutionise robots and drones

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Updated July 05, 2017 15:58:56 Scientists investigating how bees see colours say the insect's highly efficient visual system could revolutionise the way robots and drones view the world. The way humans see colour is heavily affected by the changing light around them, such as during a sunset or in the middle of the night, but bees see the same colour regardless.

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THE Definitive Bee Anatomy Book - Understanding Bee Anatomy - A FULL Colour Guide

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Lars Chittka didn't expect much when he decided to see if bumblebees could learn to pull a string for a reward. While animals from birds to apes can solve this puzzle, it seemed unlikely that bees could solve it too because they have such tiny brains.

"I asked what may have seemed an entirely mad question," says Chittka, a behavioral ecologist at Queen Mary University of London.

But it turned out not be mad in the slightest. In new research reported in PLOS Biology, Chittka and his colleagues got a "big surprise": they found that bumblebees could easily be trained to pull strings for sugar water.

First the researchers attached strings to blue discs with sugar water in the middle, and then let the bees learn that these fake flowers held a reward. The next step was putting the flowers under plexiglass - only the very tips of the strings were within reach. This was the first test of string pulling in an insect.

With this training, more than half of the bees solved the puzzle, vigorously pulling the string toward them until they could drink the sweet reward in the flower. Another experiment showed that while untrained bees rarely learned this skill on their own, a few actually did. "This was even more of a surprise," Chittka says.

The researchers also found that this new skill spread socially and culturally from bee to bee. After watching trained bees demonstrate their string-pulling prowess, 60 percent of untrained bees solved the problem on their own. And adding a single trained bee to a colony of untrained bees was enough for many of them to acquire the skill.

"This was the final surprise - there is still a common perception that humans, and especially the cultural processes seen in humans, are unique in their cognitive performances," Chittka says. "It's tempting to assume that a large brain is a prerequisite for such phenomena." But, as his work shows, problem solving and cultural transmission don't necessarily take much brainpower.

Besides enjoying the insights from his work, Chittka relishes the "sheer absurdity" of watching bees solve the string-pulling puzzle. "When I first saw it, I just couldn't believe what I was seeing," he says. "Even now, looking at the videos still makes me laugh."

Research Article: Alem S, Perry CJ, Zhu X, Loukola OJ, Ingraham T, Søvik E, et al. (2016) Associative Mechanisms Allow for Social Learning and Cultural Transmission of String Pulling in an Insect. PLoS Biol 14(10): e1002564. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002564

Videos: http://plos.io/2dLyxhO

Image Credit: Sylvain Alem

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Even tiny bumblebee brains can solve complex problems

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Lars Chittka didn't expect much when he decided to see if bumblebees could learn to pull a string for a reward. While animals from birds to apes can solve this puzzle, it seemed unlikely that bees could solve it too because they have such tiny brains.

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Recently, researchers at Queen Mary University of London trained a group of buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) to get little balls into goals - in a soccer-like game - in exchange for sweet treats.

Listen to the Story.

It's not the first time bees have flexed their mental muscle in the lab. In addition to learning games, bees can also recognize human faces in photographs, count to four, and solve computer science's famous "traveling salesman" problem.

"All too often, people will assume that because a bee's brain is little, which it undoubtedly is - it's no larger than perhaps a pinhead - that it might, therefore, be simple or not complex," says Lars Chittka, a professor of sensory and behavioral ecology at Queen Mary University of London, and one of the soccer study's co-authors. (He also co-authored the "traveling salesman" study.)

But he explains that while bees pack just a million neurons into their tiny brains, each one may be as complex in structure as a fully grown oak tree. What's more, bee neurons are extraordinarily networked: "A single one of these nerve cells might make contact with perhaps 10,000 or 100,000 other cells in that same brain."

"So, it's a long way from being a simple brain, but perhaps it's simpler than obviously a human brain with its 85 billion neurons," he says. "And so, therefore, we're hoping that we can use bees as a shortcut to understand integrative brain function and multitasking."

In the soccer study, researchers trained a group of bees to use balls as tools or tokens to get a sugary reward, Chittka explains. "And the same way that you use perhaps a token to put in a vending machine in order to obtain a sugary sweet bar or something like that, they had to learn to move that ball from a particular destination to a goal."

Then, a second group of "observer" bees watched the trained bees steer the ball in exchange for a treat and soon learned how to play the game themselves. They even figured out a more efficient way to win, using a technique that wasn't available to the first group of bees.

For Chittka, the remarkable part about the "soccer bee" experiments isn't that the bumblebees learned to push past obstacles to get a reward - he says they do that already, in complex flowers like snapdragons.

"But in this case, they really had to have the flexibility to move an object from A to B," he explains. "What was even more remarkable is the way in which uninformed individuals that had no prior exposure to this task learned it from their sisters."

To Chittka and his colleagues, that kind of cognitive flexibility could bode well for bees' ability to adapt their behaviors under ecological pressure. But as bee researchers caution, flexibility and intelligence aren't precisely the same thing.

"As humans, we tend to think of intelligence in very human terms," says Felicity Muth, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Nevada, Reno, whose work also focuses on bumblebees. "But of course, every animal's cognition is just evolved to deal with the situation that the animal has to deal with. ... So, I think what this shows here, is a kind of very specific form of cognition that bees use in their natural environment."

In fact, bees may not even be the smartest insects in the animal kingdom - just some of the best-studied ones. Muth points out that humans have long had a close relationship with bees, and they also make great lab subjects. "They're endlessly motivated to partake in experiments, and they have all these interesting cognitive abilities that makes them really rewarding to work with," she says.

Chittka also says that some species of wasps can recognize others in their colony by their individual facial features. And some solitary wasps keep multiple nests at a time, remembering the locations of all of them. "So, there's probably plenty of intelligence in other insects that has been poorly explored."

But for now, there's a lot more Chittka wants to uncover about the secret smarts of bees. "One of the things that we are extremely curious about ... is how can such a little brain juggle so many tasks and learn so many things and store so much information?"

Now, he says, his team is working with skilled technicians to model the bee brain, exploring how bees can get so much done with their minimal circuitry. Depending on what Chittka and other researchers learn, lessons from tiny bee brains could have outsized applications.

"One reason why we study bees - and we actually have quite a bit of funding from an engineering research council at the moment - [is] because of the obvious question of how can you navigate reliably over long distance with essentially zero percent errors, by using such a tiny microcomputer as a bee has?"

"So, I imagine you could steer a jumbo jet from start to finish with a computer as 'large' as a bee brain."
This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI's Science Friday.

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How do tiny little bee brains do so much?

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Recently, researchers at Queen Mary University of London trained a group of buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) to get little balls into goals - in a soccer-like game - in exchange for sweet treats. Listen to the Story. It's not the first time bees have flexed their mental muscle in the lab.

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Researchers have used new micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) scanning techniques to imagea bumblebee's ( Bombus terrestris) dinky brain in unprecedented detail.

The pictures and findings, published on Wednesday in a study in Scientific Reports, will allow researchers from Imperial College London to learn more about the bee's cerebral processing power and help them get to the bottom of why its brain malfunctions in certain situations.

"What's novel about this research is how we're able to explore such a miniature brain," said Richard Gill, paper co-author and a lecturer in the division of ecology and evolution at Imperial College London. "We can keep the brain in its normal stereo geometry, and we can keep going back to the images and samples as much as we like. It's a non-destructive method as we don't have to take the bee's brain apart."

The paper explains that CT scanning-which uses X-rays to provide hundreds of image slices of an object-has long been used to explore how the "volume, shape, and density of particular human brain regions." However, there are a dearth of studies like this when it comes to the bee's pea-sized brain.

Why? Up until now, researchers haven't been able to deal effectively with some of the logistical issues presented by a bee brain; the teeny composite structures are pretty hard to manipulate, prepare, and observe in high-res.

Previous techniques saw researchers physically removing and slicing up insect brains-causing damage to the tiny structures during the process, and scuppering the chance of accurate measurements of their shape and size. The new micro-CT techniques have jumped this hurdle, allowing researchers to recreate 3D reconstructions of 19 bee brains using an open source visual analysis software called SPIERS. This allows them both to visualize the whole brain and look at the individual components making up its structure.

Why bother imaging a brain that's infinitely less complex than a vertebrate's? According to the researchers, foraging insects like bees have to learn to deal with a complex array of sensory, landscape, and chemical cues while they search for pollen. Understanding how the bee deals with these challenges will help investigate how a tiny and much more simple brain generates complex multitasking behavior, as well how the bee's navigating behavior evolved.

"Bees are known to perform very complex tasks considering the size of their brains and their simplicity compared to high-level organisms," said Gill. "If we can focus on simple tissues and find the small changes that can have profound effects on behavior, it can give us a basis to start understanding how very small changes to that brain can do that."

Next up, the researchers aim to use the micro-CT scanning technology to understand how trauma affects the bee's brains, and subsequently their ability to forage for food.

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This Is What a CT Scan of a Bumblebee's Brain Looks Like

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Researchers have used new micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) scanning techniques to imagea bumblebee's ( Bombus terrestris) dinky brain in unprecedented detail. The pictures and findings, published on Wednesday in a study in Scientific Reports, will allow researchers from Imperial College London to learn more about the bee's cerebral processing power and help them get to the bottom of why its brain malfunctions in certain situations.

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The guests lining up outside a Brisbane gallery were not your typical culture vultures; in fact, until recently they'd never seen a painting in their life. But with just a little training, they developed their own artistic taste, showing a clear preference for Picasso's crystalline constructions or Monet's dreamy soft focus as they wandered lazily through the different rooms.

It's little wonder that their talents created such a buzz, considering that they were working with a brain smaller than a pin head: these bona fide art critics were your common or garden honey bees, trained to find a syrupy surprise behind one or other of the artists' work.

In fact, the ability to recognise artistic style was just the latest in a long list of achievements. Honey bees can count up to four, read complex signs, learn from observation and talk to each other in a secret code (the famous 'waggle dance'). When foraging, they can weigh up the distance to different flowers, planning complex routes to collect the most nectar with the least effort. And within the hive, their individual responsibilities can include cleaning, undertaking (as they tend to the dead) and even air-conditioning, as they collect water to drop on the honey comb during hot weather.

The human brain has nearly 100,000 times as many neurons as the bee brain, yet the rudiments of many of our most valued behaviours can be seen in the teeming activity of the hive. So what's the point of all that grey matter we hold in our skulls? And how does it set us apart from other animals? These are some of the questions that will be discussed at the BBC Future's World-Changing Ideas Summit in Sydney on 15 November.
ARE BIG BRAINS A WASTE OF SPACE?
About one-fifth of all you eat is used to power the electrical chit-chat between your 100 billion little grey cells. If a big brain didn't give us any advantage, that would be an enormous waste.

And there are some clear benefits. If nothing else, it makes us more efficient at what we do. If honey bees are searching a scene, for instance, they will consider each object one by one, whereas larger animals have the extra brainpower to process it all at once. We can multi-task, in other words.

A bigger brain also boosts the amount we can remember: a honey bee can grasp just a handful of associations between signs signalling the presence of food, before it starts getting confused, whereas even a pigeon can learn to recognise more than 1,800 pictures, and that's nothing compared to human knowledge. For a comparison, consider that a memory champions can remember the sequence of Pi to literally thousands of decimal places.
OK, SO WE CAN REMEMBER A LOT. WHAT ELSE?
Darwin described these kinds of distinctions as "differences of degree, not kind" - a conclusion that some might find frustrating. If you look at human civilisation and all we have achieved, surely we must have some particularly special ability that is completely lacking in all other animals?

Culture, technology, altruism and many other traits have all been touted as signs of human greatness - but the more you look, the narrower that list becomes.

Macaques, for instance, have long been known to pick up stones to crack nuts while New Caledonian crows can craft hooks from a broken stick to help them pick up food - both rudimentary forms of tool use. Even invertebrates are getting in on the act. Veined octopuses, for instance, appear to collect coconut shells, dragging them along the sea floor for later use as a shelter.

A chimp in Zambia, meanwhile, has been caught wearing a fetching tuft of grass in her ear - apparently for no other reason than that she thought it looked nice. Soon, many of the other chimps in her group copied her fashion statement, a form of adornment that some researchers have interpreted as a form of cultural expression.

Many creatures also seem to have an innate sense of fairness, and may even feel empathy for others - as our colleagues at BBC Earth recently explored - again suggesting a kind of rich emotional life that was once thought to be our specie's domain. Consider the case of a humpback whale, which was recently seen saving a seal's life, protecting it from a killer whale attack - evidence that we are not the only animal to behave altruistically.
HOW ABOUT CONSCIOUS THOUGHT?
Perhaps the answer instead lies in a "sense of self", a creature's ability to recognise itself as an individual. This navel gazing would be a rudimentary form of consciousness. Of all the different qualities that might make us unique, self-awareness is the toughest to measure with any certainty - but one common test involved daubing a spot of paint on the animal, and putting it in front of a mirror. If the animal notices the mark and tries to rub it off, we can assume that the animal recognises its reflection, suggesting it has formed some kind of concept about itself.

Humans don't develop this capacity until they are around 18-months-old, but a handful of other animals appear to demonstrated this kind of awareness, including bonobos, chimps, orang-utans, gorillas, magpies, dolphins and orca whales.
SO WE'RE NOTHING SPECIAL AFTER ALL?
Not so fast. A couple of mental capacities may be purely our own, and they are perhaps best understood by considering a family's conversation around the dinner table.

The first astonishing fact is that we can speak at all, of course. No matter what you've been thinking and feeling throughout the day, you will be able to find words to express the experience and describe it to those around you.

No other creature can communicate with such freedom. The honey bee's waggle dance, for instance, can relay the location of a flower bed, and it can even warn the other bees about the presence of a dangerous insect, but it can't express everything the bee has experienced: it is limited to a few facts about the immediate circumstances. Human language, in contrast, is open-ended. With infinite combinations of words to choose from, we can articulate our deepest feelings or lay down the rules of physics - and if we can't quite find the right term, we can just invent a new one.

What's even more remarkable though, is the fact that most of our conversation is not rooted in the present, but revolves around the past and the future, which brings us to one of the other traits that may define us. We've already explored how we may be able to recall more facts than most animals. This is 'semantic' memory. But as Thomas Suddendorf at the University of Queensland will point out at the World-Changing Ideas Summit, we also have 'episodic' recall - the ability to mentally relive past events, picturing them in multi-sensory detail. It's the difference between knowing that Paris is the capital of France, and being able to bring back the sights and sounds of your first trip to the Louvre.

Crucially, the ability to think back to the past also allows us to imagine the future, too, as we use previous experiences to predict future scenarios. You might imagine your next holiday by recalling all your past trips, for instance, allowing you to picture what kind of hotel you like, plan the sights you want to visit and build a menu of food you want to eat.

No other animal appears to have such elaborate personal memories, combined with the ability to plan whole chains of actions in advance. Even bees, with their complicated housekeeping in the hive, are probably only responding to their present circumstances; their thoughts don't go beyond the next flower they would like to visit or the danger of an intruder. They are not going to reminisce about what it felt like to be a larva.

Together with language, mental 'time travel' allows us to share our experiences and our hopes with many other people, building networks of combined knowledge that are continually growing with each generation. Science, architecture, technology, writing - in short, everything that allows you to read this article - would be impossible without it.

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David Robson is BBC Future's feature writer. He is @d_a_robson on Twitter.
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The guests lining up outside a Brisbane gallery were not your typical culture vultures; in fact, until recently they'd never seen a painting in their life.

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How Our Brains are Similar to the Honeybee

In many respects, the honeybee's brain is not as cognitively advances as humans but at the same time, humans and honeybees have a number of things in common. For example, human brains contain tens of billions of neurons that send signals throughout the body, while honey bees have just less than one million. Although this is a stark difference, both human's and bee's brains are both divided into two spheres. Scientists are just now discovering these similarities and investigating to find out more.

Humans and Bees Have "Sided" Brains

As mentioned, it has been discovered that both humans and honeybees have brains that are divided into left and right sides. Each side of a human's brain is responsible for controlling different aspects of our day-to-day functions including different thoughts, cognition, and muscle control. Scientists wanted to explore how the different sides of a bee's brain control their functionality - to do this, they removed either the right side of left side antenna from a group of honeybees and recorded their findings.

Bees who had the right side antenna removed were observed to still be able to recognize bees from their own hive while retaining the ability to feed and fight off invaders. On the other hand, bees who had their left side antenna removed took longer to recognize other honeybees from their own hive and had a harder time feeding and fighting off outsiders to the hive. This experiment proved that bees have "sided" brains, much like humans do, meaning different sides of their brain controls different functions.

Different Bee "Dances"

Scientists also believe that the different sides of a honeybee's brain may be responsible for the dances they do to indicate the presence of food. When a honeybee finds nectar in a flower, it will fly back to the hive and perform this dance to alert other hive members of the food source. This complicated sequence of moves has stumped scientists for years, but recent developments in the study of their brains may unlock more about this common bee behavior and about the evolution of their communication.

Bees perform three instructive dances as part of their communication. The most common of these is known as the "waggle" dance - this is the most complicated of the dances and traces a vertical figure eight while also pointing out the direction of the food source. This dance also indicates the distance of how far away the flowers are from the hive. Further experiments will help to determine which side of the brain controls these dances and if it is possible for bees to learn other moves.

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In many respects, the honeybee's brain is not as cognitively advances as humans but at the same time, humans and honeybees have a number of things in common. For example, human brains contain tens of billions of neurons that send signals throughout the body, while honey bees have just less than one million.