Bumblebees know how to use tools

In the low arena, the fluffy can’t take off. On the other hand, the ceiling is so high that you can’t even reach for a flower. You have to find another way to get to the prize.

The bumblebee spins the ball under the artificial flower. Reaching over the top of the ball, it reaches the sugar water with its proboscis.

The test was conducted by a Finn Olli Loukolaand the results were so significant that they were published Thursday in the prestigious In the journal Science.

Kimalainen figured out how to use the aid without anyone having taught it. Before, similar problem-solving ability has not been successfully demonstrated in invertebrates.

The study also gives an indication of the importance of brain size. It is now known that a brain smaller than the pinhead of a bumblebee is sufficient for reasoning about cause and effect.

As it is the common perception of insects has been wrong.

“It has been thought that cognitive abilities are the exclusive right of vertebrates. Insects have been considered mostly robotic reflex automatons,” says Loukola.

Loukola is a behavioral ecologist who recently moved from the University of Oulu to the University of Turku. He has studied the soul life of bumblebees for a long time.

“We have found from previous studies that bumblebees like to spin the ball and also do it for fun, that is, they play,” says Loukola.

In the past, he has taught bumblebees to play soccer. Bumblebees learn to roll the ball into the goal after first looking at a model from a teammate.

The latest research was inspired by a monkey experiment done more than a hundred years ago, where a banana was attached to the ceiling of a room. The chimpanzee got to the fruit when it managed to stack the boxes left in the room below the banana.

Now a similar problem-solving ability was proven in bumblebees.

Research in the first stage, bumblebees were taught that sugar water can be obtained from a blue artificial flower.

In the next step, the winged ones had to poke away the ball that was placed on top of the flower to get to the sugar water. The purpose was to show the bumblebee that the ball is not dangerous and that it can be moved.

However, the bumblebees were not taught how to use the ball more than that.

In the actual experiment, the vast majority of the bumblebees realized that they should roll the ball under the flower. Balancing on the ball, they reached for a drink of sugar water.

But could it be that the behavior was random? Maybe the blueness of the flower just attracted the bumblebees while they were playing with the ball.

In order to rule out this explanation, even more experiments were carried out in which there were one or more partitions between the flower and the ball.

In the last one in the test, two corners were made in the arena, one of which had an artificial flower hidden behind it.

The bumblebee was then allowed to explore the arena for a while until the ball was moved into the arena. After that, we looked at which corner the bumblebees rolled the ball.

Most of the bumblebees purposefully rolled the ball to the corner where they knew the artificial flower was.

The experiment proved that it’s not just haphazard maneuvering, but goal-oriented action. The result was surprising.

“The bumblebees had to understand the goal and keep it in mind,” says Loukola.

According to Loukola, the results point to some kind of self-understanding. At least the bumblebee has to realize its own size and the fact that with the help of the ball it can make itself bigger in order to reach the flower.

In the wild a similar problem-solving ability is useful.

The bumblebee busily transports pollen and nectar from flowers to its nest. Every day it has to look for new places to flower.

“The bumblebee has to learn quickly and make a flexible decision about where it will go looking for next,” says Loukola.

A long-term memory is not useful in work, but a short problem-solving ability is an advantage.

Every the bumblebee also has its own individual personality. This has also become apparent from Loukola’s previous studies.

Sometimes he gets indignant feedback that bumblebees are talking about personalities. Loukola does not see why a distinction should be made between humans and other species.

In bumblebees, personality manifests itself as an individual’s permanent behavior type that does not change.

Some are bolder and more aggressive. They begin to perform the task assigned to them quickly and confidently. If a researcher gets stung, it’s usually a confident bumblebee like this.

You can recognize a defiant bumblebee even in nature by its behavior, says Loukola. It opens its jaws and raises its middle limbs. Lifting a limb is a warning, and next the winged may sting.

Other are more temperate in nature.

Such a gentle bumblebee has remained in Loukola’s memory, because it invented using the researcher’s hand as a means of transportation.

Loukola was cleaning the arena where the bumblebee had left to eat. Since the furry person in question had already proven to be a sissy before, Loukola assumed that it wouldn’t sting this time either.

However, the bumblebee flew onto the researcher’s hand and stayed waiting. The researcher moved it to the mouth of the nest, where the bumblebee then left.

From that, the bumblebee learned that the “taxi ride” will also deliver on the following days.

“We continued this for a few weeks, until the end of the bumblebee’s life.”