Why the University of Chester is getting bees to show off their ball skills

Bees have been trained to roll a ball to a goal matching its colour, as part of research involving the University of Chester.

It was part of a project seeking a better understanding of the ability of insects to learn and reason.

While the footballing skills of humans are about to put under the spotlight in the World Cup, the research on buff-tailed bumblebees in the ball-rolling tool selection tasks has been published in the international journal, iScience.

The bees’ performance was assessed on a platform with three lanes, with the lanes being connected at a central point by the ‘the goal.'

To successfully complete the training, the bee needed to select the ball that matched the platform’s colour and move it to the goal, to be rewarded with a sucrose solution using a syringe.

If the bee did not successfully perform the task, a model bumblebee was used to demonstrate how to obtain the reward.

Dr Pizza Chow from the University of Chester said:"Our findings affect our practice in doing good science: we should diversify stimuli that we use in experiments, if we want to draw robust conclusions when studying animal cognition.

“It is important to increase our understanding of insects’ behaviour and minds so that we can help them in terms of conservation and more. In this case, it is bees because their populations have significantly decreased in recent years.”

Associate Professor Olli Loukola, from the University of Oulu, Finland, was also involved in the project.

He said: “It’s surprising how complex rules the bumblebees learn in the ball-rolling task. Even more amazing is how much the differences in training affect their performance in the generalisation task.”