In 2023, scientists trained bumblebee demonstrators to open a puzzle box; other bees copied the method until the behavior spread through their colonies

Bees are not just tiny pollinators buzzing from flower to flower. Turns out, they can learn a brand new skill just by watching another bee do it. The study, ‘Bumblebees acquire alternative puzzle-box solutions via social learning,’ published in PLOS Biology in March 2023, found that when researchers trained a single bumblebee to open a two-option puzzle box, the skill spread through the rest of its colony. The team from Queen Mary University of London says that untrained bees copied the exact method they saw demonstrated, rather than working it out themselves. This is one of the clearest signs yet that even a tiny insect brain can learn socially, just like primates and birds.

The puzzle box that started it all

The setup was straightforward. There was a transparent spinning lid above the box containing sugar water. Opening the box could be done either by pressing a red button in a clockwise direction or pressing a blue button in a counter-clockwise direction. As explained in the study, both ways worked equally well, and there was no inherent advantage in either of them. It allowed researchers to track how a habit spreads without either method having an advantage.


One bee, the "demonstrator," was trained in a step-by-step process to use only one of the two methods. The trained bee was released into a colony where no bees had experience in opening this particular box. The study says the untrained bees, called observers, learned to open the box in the same way as the demonstrator. Most stuck closely to copying what they'd seen rather than exploring alternatives, though, as the next section shows, that wasn't the whole story for every bee.

Learning from a friend beat figuring it out alone

To test whether the behavior was social learning rather than something bees could discover on their own, the scientists also ran the experiment with colonies that had no trained demonstrators. In these "control" colonies, the results were far less successful. Eventually, a few bees learned to open the box, but they did so less often and less consistently than bees with demonstrators. The researchers say the difference was statistically significant, supporting the conclusion that social learning, rather than trial and error alone, helped explain the bees’ success.

Another notable result was that more than half of the bees exposed to the demonstrator also went on to explore and discover the second, undocumented way to open the box, even while continuing to favor the method they'd been shown. However, as the research shows, among the demonstrator-exposed colonies specifically, the bees still overwhelmingly favored their taught method, using it in 98.6% of all box openings on average.

Bees join an exclusive club of social learners

Behavior in which a new skill spreads through a group by copying, rather than instinct, has mostly been documented in animals already considered intelligent. One example is captive chimpanzees. In a 2005 study published in Nature, the researchers taught one high-ranking female in each of two groups of chimpanzees to use one of two techniques to get food from a puzzle device. Thirty out of 32 chimps that watched a trained demonstrator learn the trick went on to learn it themselves, but none of the third group, which did not see a trained demonstrator do the trick, did.

Birds show a similar pattern. A separate Nature study titled ‘Experimentally induced innovations lead to persistent culture via conformity in wild birds’ found that after two trained birds were released into wild populations, their foraging trick was adopted by almost 75 percent of the population, and remained a local preference for multiple generations. The bumblebee researchers set up their experiment to parallel this bird study and the earlier chimpanzee one, and the results, they say, were strikingly similar, although the bees have a much simpler brain.

Why this matters beyond the bee world

That's not to say that bees are secretly running tiny societies with traditions passed down through generations. A bumblebee colony usually lasts only one season, so there is no next generation of workers to carry these habits forward as there would be in a chimp troop or bird flock. The PLOS Biology researchers say their findings are more of a proof of concept. Bees seem to possess the cognitive capacity for social learning and the retention of a specific taught skill, regardless of the fact that a real bumblebee colony in the wild seldom has the chance to build on it over time.

It is a meaningful finding nonetheless. Insect behaviour was long considered mostly automatic, a series of hardwired responses that never really change. This research suggests there’s more to the story. An insect-sized brain, far smaller than a chimpanzee’s or a bird’s, can watch, copy, and stick with a learned habit almost as reliably as those animals can. So next time a bumblebee lands nearby, remember it might be carrying more than just pollen. Perhaps it has a habit it picked up from a fellow bee, passed on one careful copy at a time.