The bees that can learn like humans

[Music] Bumblebees are pretty smart in the wild these social insects can make foraging decisions on the fly to maximize their energy rewards meanwhile in experiments they've been shown to be capable of learning complex behaviors from other bees but now bumblebees have shown an ability never seen before in invertebrates learning to open a two-step puzzle box too complicated to crack through trial and error alone by watching another B in fact before now this kind of behavior has only been seen in

one other species humans and it's posing the question do bumblebees have the capacity for culture culture is a broad term that can be difficult to pin down in this case when scientists talk about culture they referring to a phenomenon by which behaviors and ideas learned socially through observation or teaching persist in a group or society and animals have culture too researchers have observed behaviors that meet the definition for culture across the Animal Kingdom from Japanese maacs to new Ca

ledonian crows the behaviors that we recognize as cultural their things like to use and their song things that kind of resemble stuff that humans do whereas if you have something like a bee and invertebrate they are so completely different both in terms of their biology and just their sort of their life history their Niche that people by and large tend to assume that it was pretty much all inate that this was all genetically pre-programmed I guess our question was is there potential that culture

could have contributed Bumblebees are easy to train and prodigious social Learners previous experiments have shown that they can be taught to pull strings and roll balls for rewards and that other bumblebees can learn this Behavior by observing trained bees even modifying the techniques of the bees they've been watching but learning how to perform simple tasks like these is a long way from the complexities of human culture it's still thought that hum ability to learn behaviors that are so compl

ex that we can't possibly rein ofate them ourselves in isolation is what makes us unique and is responsible for our success as a species so what we wanted to find out was whether a tiny bee was capable of the same thing almost every part of our day-to-day lives is built on knowledge and technology which is too complex to work out in isolation instead it takes many generations of iterative steps to develop no one could have split the atom or traveled into space without the years of advances that

came first but could bumblebees really be capable of anything resembling this kind of cumulative culture we designed a puzzle box for the bees that they had to open in order to get a reward so the reward we put it on a yellow Target that was covered by a transparent lid in order to rotate this lid around so that they could get to the reward they first had to move a blue tab by pushing it out of the way of a red tab which then they could push against and rotate the lid around the central axis and

get their reward the key element is the the first part of the behavior so pushing the blue tab is unrewarded they don't get any reward for doing that they have to wait until after they've pushed the red tab as well while it might sound simple this box proved impenetrable for untrained bumblebees given hours of exposure to the puzzle puzles they never stumbled upon the solution despite the reward being tantalizingly close in fact even training the bees to complete this puzzle proved tricky we ha

d to add a temporary reward beneath the blue tab so they could get that and then go and get the one after the red Tab and then later on during the training we took that away which they really really didn't like us for doing but um eventually after sort of lots of coaxing they they did accept that they had to wait until they're done both behaviors but we couldn't even train them to do it without putting a reward there and yet when they added a bee that had never seen the puzzle in with a trained

bee their social learning skills kicked in they were still able to learn from observing the demonstrator how to do the complete thing this is really not trivial for bees with this puzzle box we were actually asking the bees not just to do something something that they weren't getting a reward for we were asking them to move away from the location of the reward first before they can get it and yeah it might seem pretty simple to humans but for a b this is this is really really difficult this isn'

t the first time an animal has solved a multi-part puzzle but the crucial difference here is that for a bee this puzzle box was too hard to work out on their own they could only learn it through training with an inter reward or by copying another bee and the researchers think this could have implications far beyond bumble bees it must raise the possibility that all sorts of other animals are capable of doing this one of I think the reasons perhaps why we haven't been able to show that is because

it it is really difficult to design a behavioral Paradigm that is so difficult that they can't learn it themselves but they are still able to learn from others there are limitations to the Bumblebee approach these bumblebee colonies only survive for a single generation and that's a problem if you want to study how behaviors might be passed on long term so it's likely with our bumblebees that any culture that maybe they were able to come up with during during their time um would be lost at that

point and they'd have to sort of start again from zero are other social insects and bees so honeybee colonies persist consistently over many years there are some tropical bumble bees that do the same stingless bees the long-term goal would be to see whether things such as the nest design uh behaviors such as the leaf catur ant farming even the honeybee dance language it's not purely innate I think quite a lot of these behaviors these supposedly inate pavers even if they are now perhaps they were

n't always I mean there are mechanisms through which uh selection can act on either General cognitiv ability or behavioral biases it's possible that learn traits might become increasingly inate over time I would love to know whether this is what in fact has happened whether maybe when we looked at these animals we didn't see culture because we were looking too late