WAIT, WHAT?!
Bees learn to read simple ‘Morse code’
Queen Mary University of London
image:
Experimental Apparatus. On the right is the wooden nest box where bees live. It is connected by acrylic tunnels to the observation chamber at the top of the picture and the three experimental compartments on the left. Bees feed in the observation chamber and those bees that were motivated to feed (active foragers) were chosen for experiments. The experimental compartments are where the bees were presented with the stimuli and solutions (sugar or bitter quinine during training and water during test).
view moreCredit: Alex Davidson, Queen Mary University of London
Biology Letters study shows that bumblebees can be trained to differentiate between long and short light flashes
Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have shown for the first time that an insect – the bumblebee Bombus terrestris – can decide where to forage for food based on different durations of visual cues.
In Morse code, a short duration flash or ‘dot’ denotes a letter ‘E’ and a long duration flash, or ‘dash’, means letter ‘T’. Until now, the ability to discriminate between ‘dot’ and ‘dash’ has been seen only in humans and other vertebrates such as macaques or pigeons.
PhD student Alex Davidson and his supervisor Dr Elisabetta Versace, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Queen Mary, led a team that studied this ability in bees. They built a special maze to train individual bees to find a sugar reward at one of two flashing circles, shown with either a long or short flash duration. For instance, when the short flash, or ‘dot’, was associated with sugar, then the long flash, or ‘dash’, was instead associated with a bitter substance that bees dislike.
At each room in the maze, the position of the ‘dot’ and ‘dash’ stimulus was changed, so that bees could not rely on spatial cues to orient their choices. After bees learned to go straight to the flashing circle paired with the sugar, they were tested with flashing lights but no sugar present, to check whether bees’ choices were driven by the flashing light, rather than by olfactory or visual cues present in the sugar.
It was clear the bees had learnt to tell the light apart based on their duration, as most of them went straight to the ‘correct’ flashing light duration previously associated with sugar, irrespective of spatial location of the stimulus.
Alex Davidson said: “We wanted to find out if bumblebees could learn to the difference between these different durations, and it was so exciting to see them do it”.
“Since bees don’t encounter flashing stimuli in their natural environment, it’s remarkable that they could succeed at this task. The fact that they could track the duration of visual stimuli might suggest an extension of a time processing capacity that has evolved for different purposes, such as keeping track of movement in space or communication”.
“Alternatively, this surprising ability to encode and process time duration might be a fundamental component of the nervous system that is intrinsic in the properties of neurons. Only further research will be able to address this issue.”
The neural mechanisms involved in the ability to keep track of time for these durations remain mostly unknown, as the mechanisms discovered for entraining with the daylight cycle (circadian rhythms) and seasonal changes are too slow to explain the ability to differentiate between a ‘dash’ and a ‘dot’ with different duration.
Various theories have been put forward, suggesting the presence of a single or multiple internal clocks. Now that the ability to differentiate between durations of flashing lights has been discovered in insects, researchers will be able to test different models in these ‘miniature brains’ smaller than one cubic millimetre.
Elisabetta Versace continued: “Many complex animal behaviours, such as navigation and communication, depend on time processing abilities. It will be important to use a broad comparative approach across different species, including insects, to shed light on the evolution of those abilities. Processing durations in insects is evidence of a complex task solution using minimal neural substrate. This has implications for complex cognitive-like traits in artificial neural networks, which should seek to be as efficient as possible to be scalable, taking inspiration from biological intelligence.”
3D model of experimental apparatus. A bee is doing an experimental trial. Its route from the nest box is traced in red through removable plastic doors. In the first experimental compartment the stimuli are displayed on the monitor and plastic chips hold the associated solution (sugar or bitter quinine during training and water during test). The first attempt at feeding from one of the chips is recorded as a choice of stimulus. The bee will continue to the next two compartments for the next trials so that each foraging bout includes three trials.
Credit
Alex Davidson, Queen Mary University of London
Stimuli. The stimuli are yellow circles, as shown on the left of the picture, that flash on and off for different durations. A schematic of the on (peaks) and off (troughs) states for both stimuli are shown. This representation is taken from the second experiment in which the total amount of light was equal over a five second cycle (2.5 seconds in the on state for each stimulus).
Credit
Alex Davidson, Queen Mary University of London
Journal
Biology Letters
Article Title
Duration discrimination in the bumblebee Bombus terrestris
Article Publication Date
12-Nov-2025
Bees thrive in overlooked pockets of Puget Sound
Washington State University
PULLMAN, Wash. -- To the casual observer, it’s nothing more than an abandoned golf course.
But the land, along with other weedy, minimally maintained “marginal lands” in the Puget Sound area, is home to scores of wild bee species, including many never found before in Snohomish and King counties, according to a seven-year study by Washington State University researchers and others.
The survey of bees at three plots of land near airports and beneath power lines adds to the evidence that small corners of largely untended land can sustain bee populations amid the concrete and asphalt landscape of cities — even more effectively than parks and farms managed for hosting bees.
“Someone looking from the outside would say this is a junky old golf course that has been left to rot,” said David Crowder, a professor and researcher in WSU’s Department of Entomology who was the corresponding author of the new paper. “But it has 118 bee species in it, some that have never been seen before in our state.”
In fact, the marginal lands hosted significantly more bee species than diversified farms surveyed in recent years; other recent studies have found that urban “wastelands” such as vacant lots with wild flowering plants host larger bee populations than managed parks.
The study was published in the journal Ecology and Evolution. Co-authors included Riley Anderson, a postdoctoral researcher in Crowder’s lab, along with Will Peterman of Bee Search, a longtime bee enthusiast who has tracked bee populations in Western Washington for years, and the late Robert Redmond, a beekeeper who founded a non-profit dedicated to improving pollinator habitat, The Common Acre. Evan Sugden of Entomo-Logic, which specializes in the cultivation and supply of bees, was the lead author.
As concerns about bee populations grow, urban dwellers have undertaken a variety of approaches to help protect them, from pollinator gardens to municipal parks managed for bee populations. Until recent years, the marginal lands surveyed in the new study were largely overlooked as a resource.
“If you look across America, governments and municipalities own a lot of land that is not being developed but is minimally maintained — land around airports that can’t be developed because planes need to come in, land underneath power lines, easements along highways and roads,” said Crowder, who is also the director of WSU’s Decision Aid System, which provides information on pests and diseases to tree fruit and potato growers. “There’s always been a consideration: Should we develop that? Could we plant flowers in these types of habitats? How might we manage these types of habitats? Do we just let them go wild?”
The study originated in 2014. Members of nonprofit groups gathered samples using traps and netting at three sites in the Puget Sound region: two near airports, including the former golf course, and one beneath a power line. They returned monthly to gather samples between April and October for seven years. Overall, they collected more than 25,000 specimens representing 118 confirmed species. Other recent surveys of diversified farms have found just 75 species.
Individual sites in the new study hosted between 15 and 35 species in any given year. Nearly half of all specimens were of the globally common Halictidae family—ground-nesting species known as “sweat bees.”
The robust presence of diverse species is an important sign of ecological health.
“Different species do different jobs in the environment,” Crowder said. “If you have a diverse community of species, they’ll be pollinating plants throughout the year. If one species happens to be really harmed in any given year or goes extinct, there might be other species there that can fill in and do the same job.”
Few such bee surveys have been conducted in Western Washington. As public attention toward bees — and the threats to their survival — has grown, efforts to survey bee populations have increased across the world.
Those surveys are a crucial step to understanding what’s going on with bees, Crowder said. But it’s important to bring data from different surveys together to expand the picture of bee health.
“We can get something out of these individual studies but there’s a great opportunity for us to collate the data together at a big scale and learn about how bees are doing, where they’re doing well, where they’re not doing well,” Crowder said.
Journal
Ecology and Evolution
Method of Research
Observational study
Subject of Research
Animals
Article Title
Structure of Bee Communities in Marginal Lands of the Puget Sound, USA
