European research led by Melbourne vision scientist Dr Adrian Dyer found a
honey bee can be trained to recognise a face. Bees were given a choice of
approaching photos of human faces, one of which had a sweet solution. They
learned which face had the solution and flew back to it. Further tests
showed the bees were still able to recognise a face after two days.

http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au

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Knowing honeybees' unusual propensity for distinguishing between different
flowers, visual scientist Adrian Dyer of Cambridge University in Cambridge,
England, wondered whether that talent stretched to other contexts. So he and
his colleagues pinned photographs of four different people's faces onto a
board. By rewarding the bees with a sucrose solution, the team repeatedly
coaxed the insects to buzz up to a target face, sometimes varying its
location.

Even when the reward was taken away, the bees continued to approach the
target face accurately up to 90% of the time, the team reports in the 2
December Journal of Experimental Biology. And in the bees' brains, the
memories stuck: The insects could pick out the target face even two days
after being trained. Dyer says the results challenge the idea that a
specialized part of the brain is necessary to recognize a human face. "You
see things in humans which you might attribute to having complex, mammalian
brain, but until you go and test it in bees, you can't exclude the fact that
a simple brain can do it."

It's a "neat study" that shows that bees are smarter than most people think,
says cognitive neuroscientist Michael Tarr of Brown University in
Providence, Rhode Island. But he believes the task the bees completed
doesn't have much to do with how humans recognize each other's faces: "If
they had used potatoes, I suspect they would have obtained the same result."

Ethologist James Gould, who has done extensive research on how bees
recognize flowers, agrees that humans have a specific evolutionary reason to
be able to identify other people's faces, whereas for bees, it's just
another shape and pattern. "For bees, faces are just a really strange
looking flower," he says.

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org

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