Bees can count. They’re not going to be doing your taxes anytime soon, though after a little bit of evolution and a reading of the tax code, it’s not completely off the table.

A new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B adds weight to a long-running debate about whether honeybees actually understand numbers or are just really good at spotting visual patterns. Some have argued that bees weren’t actually counting at all, just reacting to how busy or complex an image looked.

A team of researchers led by Monash University revisited earlier experiments, but this time they tried to see the data the way a bee would. That meant taking into account all the limitations inherent in a bee’s eyes, which perceive the world with a lot less detail than human vision. Previous studies didn’t seem to fully take this into account, as they stacked the deck by using images with finer details that bees can’t fully process.

When the researchers took another look at those visual tests using models that reflect how bees actually see, all those previous pattern-based explanations started to fall apart. All that stuff about bees choosing images with more edges or with more visual clutter wasn’t consistent with the ways bees view the world. What was clear was that bees were responding to the number of objects present. This suggests a basic ability to distinguish numerical differences.

Just How Smart Are Bees?

That in itself is a major finding, but maybe the bigger lesson to be taken from all of this doesn’t have to do with the bees and their ability to count, but in giving human researchers a lesson in stepping outside of their own assumptions on how the world works. Evaluating cognition through a human perspective is a path that leads directly to underestimating or misconstruing what other species are actually capable of.

Bees have a brain smaller than a grain of rice, yet can compute numbers. They are doing their part in wrecking preconceived notions about how brain size equals intelligence, something I covered recently in a story about how researchers are coming around to the idea that Neanderthals might’ve been just as smart as humans, which we assumed wasn’t the case because their brains were smaller than ours.

All of this amounts to a small but vital perspective shift on how we previously viewed a species, and it’s all thanks to a vital perspective shift where human researchers put themselves in the shoes of the animals they were studying.¿