Everyone knows bees are busy. Research at KU is revealing that they’re also surprisingly smart.

“This organism makes honey, which is a lot of work,” said Daniel Najera, Lawrence doctoral student in entomology. “Its survival depends on intelligence. Bees must know where food is all day long.”

Bees “dance” to communicate distance and direction to a food source. But when a source runs out, instead of returning to the hive for new instructions, bees often take shortcuts to new sources. And the dance language doesn’t communicate that.

“The new answer is, they’re smarter than we thought,” Najera said.

Najera leads a group of students working with Rudolf Jander, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, to test bees’ cognitive abilities. To do this, they manipulate feeding stations. If they move a station in a repeated pattern through several days, the bees learn to predict the pattern. Similarly, they’ve discovered that bees can work out the more complex interactions of multiple factors, such as location plus odor plus time of day. They call this ability context-specific reasoning, and bees turn out to be highly skilled. Najera said the work helps lay a foundation for understanding how neural networks operate.

“We don’t know how nervous systems work,” Najera said. “It’s one of the top four or five gaps in human knowledge. How do you generate the concept of physical pain? We have no clue. Let alone love, grief, things like that.”

Two KU Endowment scholarships have supported Najera’s work over summer sessions: the R.H. Beamer Scholarship and the John M. Deal Scholarship. “To have funds handed to me because someone is interested in the generation of new knowledge really energizes me,” Najera said. “When someone gives you money because of an idea you’ve had, you don’t want to let anyone down.”

— Charles Higginson