Animals
Can bees recognise human faces?
The short answer
Yes. In a 2005 study, honeybees were trained on photographs from a standard human face-recognition test and picked the target face out from a similar distractor with better than 80 percent accuracy — and still remembered it two days later.
Adrian Dyer and colleagues showed honeybees photographs of human faces taken from a standard psychology test, rewarding them for choosing one particular face. The bees learned it, discriminated it from a deliberately similar distractor at better than 80 percent accuracy, and retained the memory for at least two days.
Follow-up work in 2010 got at how. The bees are not recognising a person in any sense we would mean it. They are learning the relative arrangement of features — the configuration that happens to make up a face-like pattern — which is a general-purpose visual trick they use on flowers too.
The reason it caused a stir is that face recognition was widely assumed to need a large brain, possibly a dedicated region for it. A honeybee has under a million neurons. Apparently that is enough.
Sources
- Honeybee (Apis mellifera) vision can discriminate between and recognise images of human facesJournal of Experimental Biology
- Bees can recognize human faces, study findsPhys.org