Discover an amazing fact about bees that no one has told you yet!
The latest studies have shown that bees are as learning as we are, and can simply differentiate between even and odd numbers. Scientists have arrived at this fact after several experiments that showed how bees can be trained to differentiate between numerical groups, and how their animal nature can be biased to a certain way in dividing the two groups, as we humans do.
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To bring you closer to the subject, how do you learn to differentiate between even and odd numbers? There are several ways: Either numbers ending in 1, 3, 5, 7 or 9 are odd, while numbers ending in 0, 2, 4, 6, or 8 are even numbers, or another way is to divide the number by "2". The result is an integer that we say is even, otherwise odd. And the subject is simply the same for those organisms, they can recognize (or learn to recognize) the distinction between the two groups through the process of association (if the number is such, the product is such).
Studies have recently shown that bees can learn to order quantities, perform simple addition and subtraction, match symbols to quantities, and associate concepts of size and numbers. The study included two groups of bees, the first of which was trained to associate even numbers with sugar water (coupling: associate the presence of sugar water with even numbers), and the other to associate quinine liquid (a bitter-tasting liquid) with odd numbers.
Of course, this division has been calibrated in the study to resemble the innate human way of thinking: humans exhibit biases in accuracy, speed, language and spatial relationship, when classifying numbers as odd or even, for example: we respond faster to even numbers if the actions we take, are right-handed , odd numbers for the left hand. Research has also found that children often associate “husband” with “right” and “single” with “left,” even as I do!
So, in a new study published Friday in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, it turns out that bees simply can learn that classification. The researchers trained groups of bees "odds" one by one, using comparisons of odd versus even numbers (with cards offering 1 to 10 printed shapes), and the results showed the bees choosing 80% of the correct answers. But it was noted that bees' bias toward odd numbers is similar to ours' bias toward evenness. They instinctively associate odd numbers with sugar water, not even numbers.
The scientists repeated the experiment by testing each bee with new numbers not developed during the first training. Impressively, the bees classified the new numbers of 11 or 12 elements as odd, meaning that their classifications were correct with an accuracy of about 70%. Comparing the human brain, which has 86 billion neurons, and the insect brain, which has 960,000 neurons, both of which ranked the numbers, the scientists wondered if the valence task was less complicated but we didn't know.
So the scientists ran a test using artificial neural networks, which they built with just 5 neurons to perform a valence test by
by beats (0-40 beats), the result is that the network's rating of the numbers that were displayed correctly is 100%. The test showed that valence classification in principle does not require a large and complex brain like the human brain.