From Lab to Life: Honeybees Recognize Faces

Over the years, I’ve taught perhaps thousands of MBA students in many countries. From time to time, one of them pops up – and I am challenged to recognize their faces and remember where and when we crossed paths. Usually, I fail.

At these moments, I wish I were… a honeybee.

Space Daily reports that honeybees “can recognize human faces – they can be trained to distinguish between individual humans by face and continue to recognize them across different viewpoints despite having a brain smaller than the head of a pin!”

Run that “brain the size of a pin” by me once again? My brain, like all brains, has 86 billion neurons. A bee brain has one million neurons. My brain has 86,000 times more neurons than a bee’s. Yet the honeybee can recognize faces probably better than me.

Facial recognition technology has treated this problem as highly complex – and it is still far from perfect (my iPhone sometimes fails to recognize my face and asks for a password). But bees have cracked it. Not only that – a returning honeybee from a foraging trip can do a dance that precisely communicates where it found the rich pollen source – direction and distance – in a manner that other bees navigate right to it!

How did scientists prove honeybees know faces?*

*Avargues-Weber, A., Portelli, G., Bénard, J., Dyer, A. and Giurfa, M. Configural processing enables discrimination and categorization of face-like stimuli in honeybees. Journal of Experimental Biology, 2010; 213: 593-601

A research team presented bees with photographs of human faces. One face was associated with a drop of sucrose solution (Yum!!). The other faces were associated with bitter quinine solutions (Yuck!!). Bees learned to fly to the rewarded face and avoid the others! Then, in a test trial, the bees were presented with no sugar to confirm that it was not the scent that attracted them. They still got the right face with 80 to 90 per cent accuracy.  And the bees’ memory persisted for at least two days after the training.

What is more astonishing: A follow up study examined precisely how the bees were recognizing faces. Turns out, the bees knew faces “by configural processing – the relative spatial arrangement of the facial features – rather than by the features themselves. It is the same strategy that the human visual system uses when processing faces.”

It is a source of great sadness, that honeybees are in big trouble. “The global honeybee crisis is a highly complex, multi-front battle. Managed colonies are suffering unprecedented winter die-offs, while wild native bee species face severe threats of extinction. These losses are primarily driven by the synergistic effects of habitat loss, pesticide exposure, climate change, and parasites.”

Bees are a crucial part of Nature’s amazing ecosystem, because they are crucial for pollinating plants and trees. When bees are in trouble, so are we.

It’s a shame.