The bumblebee learned the durations of light flashes, although no skill is needed in nature

Insect researchers have taught bumblebees to distinguish and recognize different light patterns. They can be considered a kind of Morse code.

In Morse code, dots and dashes correspond to one letter, and their combinations. When morsing electronically, the time duration of a dot and a line is different.

What interested the bumblebee in the experiment was that it found a sweet treat with the help of light signals.

You showed that the bumblebee (A terrestrial bomb) can search for food based on the duration of a visual cue. Kontukimalainen is a species of bumblebee.

“We wanted to find out if bumblebees can learn how long something lasts,” says the doctoral student, biologist and behavioral scientist Alex Davidson from Queen Mary University of London in the bulletin.

Understanding temporal duration can also help a small insect in nature. It might help in foraging and mating. Or you can use it to avoid predators.

For bumblebees first, a pattern was shown showing two flashing lights in the area where the bumblebee foraged. One of the lights blinked longer than the other.

One of the experiments offered five-second and one-second flashes. The second experiment used 2.5 second and 0.5 second light flashes.

One temporal duration was associated with a sugary reward, the other with quinine, a bitter substance. Bumblebees don’t like it.

The quinine-tinged taste is familiar to people from the bitter taste of tonic water.

I will try initially, the bumblebees learned which temporal duration was associated with sugar and which with quinine.

Then the bumblebees were made to navigate the maze and look for treats. They were able to navigate so many times that they succeeded 15 times out of 20.

In the rooms of the maze, the place of flashes and rewards was changed, he says website phys.org.

However, the bumblebees chose the reward-related temporal message more often than by chance.

This suggests that they were indeed able to distinguish between short and long flashes of light.

How they were able to distinguish the passage of time is still a mystery to researchers.

Bumblebees you see, do not meet the flashes of lights in nature presented in the experiment. However, they could track the duration of visual stimuli.

Temporal information processing may have evolved for different purposes. It can help, for example, to track movement, says Davidson of Queen Mary University in the bulletin.

“The ability to code the duration of time may be in the basic structures of the bumblebee’s nervous system,” he suggests.

You shows, according to Davidson, once again what a brain only about a millimeter in size is capable of. Before this, the skill had only been found in larger vertebrates.

In recent years, insect researchers have discovered many skills in the information processing of bumblebees and also bees.

They have shown in tests capacity for playfulnessand even skills master the basic concepts of mathematics.

The study was published by scientific journal Biology Lettersand the website also reported on it Science Alert.