"Using a y-maze, we found that bees can not only differentiate between
patterns containing two and three elements, but can also use this prior
knowledge to differentiate three from four, without any additional training.
However, bees trained on the two versus three task could not distinguish
between higher numbers, such as four versus five, four versus six, or five
versus six. Control experiments confirmed that the bees were not using cues
such as the colour of the exact configuration of the visual elements, the
combined area or edge length of the elements, or illusory contours formed by
the elements. To our knowledge, this is the first report of number-based
visual generalisation by an invertebrate."
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0004263

Practical applications as to marking of hives, etc???

Randy Oliver

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