Bumblebees can identify sugary liquids before they even take a sip. This ability to spot a sweet reward at a distance could mean that some of the approaches we have used to assess bee intelligence need to be re-evaluated.
“Much of what we know about insect cognition comes from work on bees,” says Tomer Czaczkes at the University of Regensburg in Germany. In many such studies, bees choose between artificial “flowers” after being trained to associate one option with a reward such…