Researchers in Australia and France claim to show honeybees learning to do symbolic addition and subtraction (really just incrementing and decrementing) based on 1-5 colored shapes at a time. Interesting ramifications if that's true.
Abstract
Many
animals understand numbers at a basic level for use in essential tasks
such as foraging, shoaling, and resource management. However, complex
arithmetic operations, such as addition and subtraction, using symbols
and/or labeling have only been demonstrated in a limited number of
nonhuman vertebrates. We show that honeybees, with a miniature brain,
can learn to use blue and yellow as symbolic representations for
addition or subtraction. In a free-flying environment, individual bees
used this information to solve unfamiliar problems involving adding or
subtracting one element from a group of elements. This display of
numerosity requires bees to acquire long-term rules and use short-term
working memory. Given that honeybees and humans are separated by over
400 million years of evolution, our findings suggest that advanced
numerical cognition may be more accessible to nonhuman animals than
previously suspected.
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