A honeybee on a lavender blossom Gregory Johnston / Alamy
Honeybees can聽calculate probability, but it seems they don鈥檛 use it the same way we tend to.
Andrew Barron at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and his colleagues trained 20 honeybees to associate the colours of artificial flowers with the likelihood of obtaining sweet water. Over multiple sessions, they presented the bees with five colours in various聽combinations of two colours at a time. Each colour was ranked one to five. For each pair, only the higher-ranking colour dispensed sweetened water.
The researchers then tested the bees on a…
