Science journal: Bumblebees can solve problems through sudden insight

A study by researchers at the University of Oulu in Finland, published in Science, showed that bumblebees are capable of solving complex tasks through sudden insight, or "aha" moments. 75% of the test group of bumblebees used a plastic ball as a tool to reach an artificial flower suspended from the ceiling-behaviour they had never previously demonstrated. The experiment suggests that even insects may be capable of higher-level cognitive processes.

Finnish researchers from the University of Oulu have published a study in Science demonstrating that bumblebees can solve complex puzzles through sudden insight, or "aha" moments, rather than through trial and error alone.

Experiment Setup

During the experiment, bumblebees were placed in a round, shallow chamber where a blue circle-an artificial flower filled with a sugar syrup reward-hung from the ceiling. The bumblebee could not fly directly to it or reach it by jumping. However, the chamber contained a plastic ball with which the bumblebees had previous experience.

Bumblebees that had prior experience both with artificial flowers and with the ball found the solution remarkably quickly: of 22 test subjects, 16-or 75%-rolled the ball under the flower on the ceiling, secured it in a prepared groove, climbed on top of the ball, and gained access to the nectar. This behaviour of using the ball as a stepping stone had never been taught to them.

Insight, or the "Aha" Moment

Insight is a concept in psychology and ethology that describes a situation where a solution is found not through gradual trial and error, but through sudden understanding. This phenomenon was first studied in animals by psychologist Wolfgang Köhler, who worked at a German biology station on the island of Tenerife in 1913. In his experiments, a chimpanzee named Sultan solved the problem of reaching a banana suspended from the ceiling in moments by pushing an empty crate into place and climbing on top of it.

Köhler's work overturned the prevailing view of the time, which held that animals were capable of solving problems only through trial and error, not through understanding.

How Scientists Ruled Out Alternative Explanations

Sceptics of earlier insight experiments have argued that animals might arrive at solutions by chance or by directly seeing the goal, which facilitates the trial-and-error process. Finnish researchers addressed these objections through three experimental variations.

In the first variation, the chamber was divided by partitions so that the bumblebee could not see the artificial flower and the ball at the same time, yet still had to find the solution. In the second variation, multiple partitions were placed symmetrically in the chamber, with the artificial flower behind only one of them. If bumblebees were acting randomly, they should move with equal probability in both directions. However, the experiments showed that after encountering the ball, bumblebees moved most often in the correct direction immediately, suggesting planned behaviour.

What This Means

The study authors are cautious about their conclusions, referring to the observed behaviour as "spontaneous problem-solving that resembles insight". To draw definitive conclusions, it would be necessary to study how bumblebee neural activity changes at the moment of finding a solution.

However, the experiment conducted by researchers at the University of Oulu is significant evidence that cognitive flexibility is not the exclusive domain of primates or even vertebrates. Bumblebees, whose brains contain only about a million neurons (compared to roughly 86 billion in humans), are capable of combining separately acquired experiences to solve an entirely new task, and doing so not gradually, but all at once.