Teaching bees to pull strings is the greatest scientific accomplishment ever
Bees are the first insects trained to pull tiny strings in exchange for food, a scientific accomplishment as goofy as it is impressive.
What's remarkable about this experiment — aside from bees pulling strings — is that the bumblebees who learned the trick were able to pass the knowledge onto others in their colony.
A research team from Queen Mary University of London started off by training 23 bees to pull a string attached an artificial blue flower, which had a sugar water reward placed on it, out from under a Plexiglass barrier.
(If you're interested to know how you train bees to do anything, let alone pull on a string, the full study has a bit more detail.)
To prove bumblebees don't naturally pick up this ability, dozens more untrained bees were given a crack at the string-pulling — but only two "exceptionally explorative" insects managed to teach themselves to do it, suggesting bee geniuses are as rare as human ones.
But when untrained bees were able to observe trained bees pulling the string, 60 percent of them learned the skill.
This demonstrated that bees are social learners, a finding reinforced when three trained bees were released into untrained colonies to successfully pass on their know-how.
"Cultural transmission does not require the high cognitive sophistication specific to humans, nor is it a distinctive feature of humans," observed the study's lead author Dr Sylvain Alem.
Dr Clint Perry, another lead author of the study, added that the research is important because "understanding social learning and culture in animals holds a key to understanding the evolutionary roots of the peculiarities of social learning and culture in humans".
If you're thinking the experiment still looks pretty ridiculous, even the research team agrees with you.
"What I like about the work, in addition to the experimental and intellectual challenges and insights, is the sheer absurdity of seeing bees solving a string-pulling puzzle," said project supervisor Professor Lars Chittka.
"When Alem first showed me a bee successfully pulling on the string, I just couldn't believe what I was seeing. And even now, looking at the videos still makes me laugh."
What the world needs is more funny science experiments. Actually, what the world needs is an army of bees trained to do all our work for us — get on top of that, please.