Sugar Reward Prompts Bees To Distinguish Human Faces From Other Images

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Bees have never been regarded as man’s best friend, even if they can look deep into our eyes. And what do they see when staring into our faces? Giant flowers. Like most behavioral training in life, a reward is involved in the bee’s behavior. In this case, the prize was sugar.

Scientists published research that bees can ‘learn’ to distinguish between simple face-like images, at least when sugar was the prize.

The bees were shown five pairs of different images, where one image was always a face and the other a pattern of dots and dashes. Bees were always rewarded with sugar when they visited the face while nothing was offered by the non-face pattern. Having trained the bees that ‘face-like’ images gave them a reward, scientists next showed the bees a completely fresh pair of images that they had not seen before to see if the bees could pick out the face-like picture. Remarkably they did. The bees were able to learn the face images, not because they know what a face is but because they had learned the relative arrangement and order of the features. via Science Daily