Making a beeline for new skills

The average Joe will readily concede that brainy scientists often immerse themselves in esoteric tasks whose immediate purpose may not always be evident. So it must have been in the case of the boffins in London who spent quite a while teaching bumblebees how to play football.

Given the agility required to manoeuvre an orb half their size into a designated goal, the first conclusion — however mundane — must be that they were unfairly named as there's clearly nothing bumbling about those insects.

The establishment of that fact, of course, was not the primary purpose of this painstaking endeavour; it was to prove that bees can be trained to do things not intrinsic to their nature: gathering honey and pollinating flowers. And there is no doubt that playing football is quite a far cry from their bee-ish predilections. That they also learnt to get better at this pointless exercise by observing their fellow bees' experiences is interesting, but, again, not particularly useful unless there are plans to eventually utilise them for unbeecoming work, if not sting operations.

More relevantly, though, this exercise proved that the size of brains do not necessarily determine the ability to learn new skills or adapt old ones. So, if bees and other insects can master football, how long before they figure out how to rule our planet, as sci-if horror dramas have always feared?