This study, designed to test a bumblebee’s learning capabilities, has found that bees can learn a skill and even improve upon it. Here the bees demonstrate learning by moving a ball to get food from both seeing it done and not seeing it done. This helps demonstrate how bees are capable of learning tasks when pressured too and it also breaks an idea that has been floating around about insects. Some people think that due to their small size that their brains are too simple to learn new tasks but here that is proven false (pending further peer-review and additional experimentation). Now that we have seen them perform these tasks I expect a bee soccer team assembled within a year and a major insect division added to professional sports. Going even further; who else knows what they can learn? Hopefully from this study other scientists will take notice and begin experimenting.

Guardian article w/original video

Research article