It sounds like a silly experiment, but the results are fascinating. NewScientist (4 March 2017) reports that you can train bees:
IT’S a hole-in-one! Bumblebees have learned to push a ball into a hole to get a reward, stretching what small-brained creatures were thought capable of.
Previous studies showed that bees could do smart things to objects directly attached to a food reward, such as pulling a string to get at food. Olli Loukola at Queen Mary University of London and his team decided the next challenge was to get bees to learn to move an object not attached to a reward.
They built a circular platform with a small hole in the centre filled with sugar solution, into which bees had to move a ball to get a reward. A researcher showed them how to do this by using a plastic bee on a stick to push the ball.
The bees did learn, and even minimised the effort needed by choosing the ball closest to the hole (Science, doi.org/bz98).
From the abstact of the academic article in Science:
Bees that observed demonstration of the technique from a live or model demonstrator learned the task more efficiently than did bees observing a “ghost” demonstration (ball moved via magnet) or without demonstration.
I’m not entirely certain if this suggests a limitation of the bee’s cognitive abilities – it has to see a creature just like it in order to recognize its own potentiality – or a demonstration that it can recognize a creature like itself, which seems unremarkable. The first link in the article selection, above, is to a video of the bees demonstrating their string pulling ability, a previous achievement.
