Honeybees are known to be one of the most intelligent animals on earth. Not only do they pollinate flowers and produce honey, but they also implement mathematical concepts into their work and lives everyday! Aristotle was the first to realize this fact and started to document their behaviors between 344 to 342 BC. Ever since, honeybees have contributed tons of knowledge to the mathematical world.
One of the many reasons why honeybees are intellectual in mathematics is because of how efficiently they design their beehives. Because wax is extremely valuable to bees, they subconsciously create a hive where it takes less wax to make, but can store the most honey. Therefore, the beehive is made out of a tessellation since only one wall can be shared between 2 shapes, which results in using less wax. A tessellation is a geometric pattern of shapes with no gaps nor overlaps. Tessellations only include 3 shapes: squares, equilateral triangles, and hexagons. Using the area formulas for all 3 shapes, the hexagon computes the greatest area if all of the shapes had the same side length hypothetically. For this reason, bees use hexagons to build beehives because they can store the most honey. As scientists discovered this fact, hexagons were used more often in architecture.
Bees can also understand the abstract idea of zero, whereas kids under the age of 6 have a hard time understanding the concept. Often many children don't think of it as a quantity, but instead as an adjective. In a conducted study, children would rather say they have no toys instead of zero toys, which expresses their conception of zero. In 2018, the Journal of Science conducted an experiment with honeybees. Scientists held up two cards with dots and the bees had to go to the card that had less dots. For example, when they held up a card with 6 dots and another with 5 dots, the bees went to the card with 5 dots and they were rewarded with sugar water. When scientists held up a card with only one dot and a blank card, the bees easily chose the card with zero dots, which shows that honeybees view zero as a quantity, unlike human kids who views it as an adjective.
Bees can also easily solve the Traveling Salesman problem. The Traveling Salesman problem asks what is the shortest route to a location out of all possible routes. For computers to solve this problem, computers mathematically calculate all the possibilities first and then choose the shortest answer. But according to research published by Plos Biology, scientists have discovered that bees use trial and error along with memory to find the shortest route to flowers to pollinate from. The study showed that the experimental honeybees traveled around 20 routes out of 120 possibilities to get to their target location. With their experience and memory, they've easily learned the shortest route.
Speaking of travel routes, honeybees would communicate their knowledge to other bees through a technique called the "waggle dance". In simple terms, bees can detect the specific location of the sun at a certain time. They would move in a figure eight shaped in the same angle as the sun is in away from the target location. For example, if the flower field was 20 degrees away from the sun, the bees would dance 20 degrees away from the direction of the other bee.
From many research and studies, bees have helped us improve our world mathematically!
Sources:
The flight paths of honeybees recruited by the waggle dance
2005J. R. Riley, U. Greggers, A. D. Smith, D. R. Reynolds, R. Menzel10.1038/nature03526Nature
Numerical ordering of zero in honey bees
2018Scarlett R. Howard, Aurore Avarguès-Weber, Jair E. Garcia, Andrew D. Greentree, Adrian G. Dyer10.1126/science.aar4975Science
Radar Tracking and Motion-Sensitive Cameras on Flowers Reveal the Development of Pollinator Multi-Destination Routes over Large Spatial Scales
2012Mathieu Lihoreau, Nigel E. Raine, Andrew M. Reynolds, Ralph J. Stelzer, Ka S. Lim, Alan D. Smith, Juliet L. Osborne, Lars Chittka10.1371/journal.pbio.1001392PLoS Biology
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