The number of neurons in the brain is about 10¹¹.

Relevance of cells other than neurons to computations in the brain.

We’re thankful for our bee geniuses and all the pure, raw & unfiltered honey they produce. Or, help out by checking our wide variety of local honeys made in the USA by brainy bees – and even brainier keepers – across the country. Is all this bee brilliance getting your brain buzzing? Put that big brain of yours to work and help us protect our pollinators. It takes a lot of skill for a travelling beekeeper to position their bees in right spot to pollinate, but it’s still up to each bee to find and pick a flower they like.

This allows a hive to thrive even as large portions of its population die off every year.Īll these brainy scout bees are better at finding their favorite local pollen sources and then reporting their findings back to the hive with the aptly named “ waggle dance.” Working together, bees are able to pick up the massive amounts of pollen and nectar needed to create local honey – all without human guidance. Every individual, from worker bees to the queen, has to have the smarts to figure most things out on their own. Because bees don’t live all that long, they can’t pass on the locations of pollen-packed flowers or nearby dangers to the next generation.

This means that they have to be able to make decisions for the well-being of the hive as a group. One explanation for bees’ outsize intelligence is their tendency to live in highly organized, eusocial hives. That’s remarkable for any animal to figure out, but especially for an insect, which generally have smaller, less-developed brains than mammals. In repeated trials, bees were able to use the clues to figure out if the reward was above or below, the same or different, or to the left or right. Bees were given a clue before being given a choice between two paths. In recent studies, scientists showed that bees are able to understand abstract relationships. Somehow, bees are capable of complex reasoning and storing memories over miles and miles of flight, and recent research has begun to show that little bee brains might be the key to understanding our own. The bee brain only contains about a million neurons, while humans have about 100 billion.

A bee’s brain weighs in at just 0.0002% of a human’s, so why is it worth our time to study it?īecause bees are much, much smarter, both individually and as a hive, than their little brains let on.

How many neurons in brain