We understand a lot about pattern recognition because it is widely used in puters for all sorts of things ranging from face recognition to short term stock market predictions.  Does pattern recognition really require much "smarts" if a puter can be so good at it?  How about slime molds which are pretty good at pattern recognition in mazes with no nervous system at all?  Like honey bees slime molds can even be taught to go towards some substance they ordinarily would avoid if given a food reward.
Consider the human abnormality face blindness.  Prosopagnosia is a neurological disorder characterized by the inability to recognize faces; it's also known as face blindness or facial agnosia.  Such people can not even recognize their own reflection in a mirror or people they are very close to such as spouse.  Some very famous and accomplished people suffer this condition such as Jane Godall and Steve Wosniak.  The actor Brad Pitt thinks he has this problem.  Some cases are congenital and others the result of an injury.  There appears to be a hereditary component.  Yet, is not recognizing faces simply a matter of pattern recognition?  Such people must lack the needed neural structures to perform such pattern recognition, yet retain pattern recognition capabilities for other normal human tasks.  It seems there likely are lots of different ways pattern recognition can be accomplished.

How about my dog?  If I tell her to "go find Dawn," she will run all over the house or yard until she finds my wife Dawn.  Now, if Dawn and my neighbor Dorothy are out in the yard picking blue berries I can tell her to go find Dorothy and she will run out and find Dorothy.  She obviously knows the difference between Dawn and Dorothy.  Again you can easy argue this is pattern recognition and I would not argue at all.  But, I doubt if this type of pattern recognition has anything to do with a slime mold working out a maze or a honey bee finding some particular flowering plant a half mile from the hive.

So, if slime molds with no nervous system at all can perform pattern recognition and yet the brainiest animal alive can totally fail at pattern recognition of faces what does this tell us about honey bees?  It seems to me that they would far more likely than not to be quite good at some kinds of pattern recognition as that could be of great help in navigation and flower identification.  A recent study I read claimed honey bees could even distinguish even from odd numbers with decent reliability up to 11.  Chickens can count up to about seven.  These abilities could also be called pattern recognition and again I would not argue.  But, I also think just stopping at the pattern recognition explanation might well be a bit premature.  There can be some pretty complex things that allow pattern recognition and those things can be highly specialized as evidenced by face blindness.
I simply do not think that evolution gave humans all kinds of mental traits that are totally absent in lower life forms such as honey bees.  Rather, in humans we can measure some of those things more objectively due to humans having language.  But, even language is a rough approximation.  I recently related that the color red is different in my left eye from what I see with my right eye.  Both eyes see red.  But the red I perceive in one eye is brighter and more intense than it is in the other eye.  Now what the heck does brighter and intense mean?  Are they two words for the same thing?  Perhaps it does not mean the same to a listener that it means to me.  In fact it might have more meaning to a honey bee than it means to a human because the bee is more dependent on colors than humans are.  This would be even more true of scents which are more important for a honey bee's survival than it is for a human's survival.
Dick


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