What’s this buzz about bees having culture? Inside a groundbreaking experiment

Over the past several decades, scientists have come to understand that ‘culture’ – essentially a species’ ability to learn and spread complex behaviours throughout a population – exists in nonhuman animals including macaques, crows and sheep. But, until recently, this ability was thought to have been limited to vertebrates. Even in creatures with sophisticated social structures like bees, these social behaviours were thought to have been innate rather than learned.

Now, a clever experiment designed by the UK behavioural ecologist Alice Bridges, then a doctoral research student at Queen Mary University of London and now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sheffield, has scientists reconsidering their assumptions. Prompting bumblebees to work through a two-step puzzle, Bridges and her team found that untrained bees could learn how to get to a sugar solution by observing others trained for the task. And, as this short video from Nature details, this is more than just a first for bees. Rather, the study marks the first time this level of socially learned problem-solving has ever been observed in a nonhuman animal population. According to Bridges, the study may indicate a capacity for culture in bumblebees and invertebrates beyond.