Examine: Bumblebees Can Be Educated to Learn Easy ‘Morse Code’

Buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) can determine the place to forage for meals based mostly on totally different durations of visible cues, in response to new analysis.

In Morse code, a brief length flash or ‘dot’ denotes a letter ‘E’ and a protracted length flash, or ‘dash’, means letter ‘T’.

Until now, the flexibility to discriminate between ‘dot’ and ‘dash’ has been seen solely in people and different vertebrates corresponding to macaques or pigeons.

Queen Mary University of London Ph.D. pupil Alex Davidson and colleagues studied this capability in Bombus terrestris bumblebees.

They constructed a particular maze to coach particular person bumblebees to discover a sugar reward at one in every of two flashing circles, proven with both a protracted or brief flash length.

For occasion, when the brief flash, or ‘dot,’ was related to sugar, then the lengthy flash, or ‘dash,’ was as an alternative related to a bitter substance that bumblebees dislike.

At every room within the maze, the place of the ‘dot’ and ‘dash’ stimulus was modified, in order that bumblebees couldn’t depend on spatial cues to orient their decisions.

After bumblebees discovered to go straight to the flashing circle paired with the sugar, they had been examined with flashing lights however no sugar current, to examine whether or not bumblebees’ decisions had been pushed by the flashing mild, moderately than by olfactory or visible cues current within the sugar.

It was clear the bumblebees had learnt to inform the sunshine aside based mostly on their length, as most of them went straight to the ‘correct’ flashing mild length beforehand related to sugar, no matter spatial location of the stimulus.

“We wanted to find out if bumblebees could learn to the difference between these different durations, and it was so exciting to see them do it,” Davidson mentioned.

“Since bumblebees don’t encounter flashing stimuli in their natural environment, it’s remarkable that they could succeed at this task.”

“The fact that they could track the duration of visual stimuli might suggest an extension of a time processing capacity that has evolved for different purposes, such as keeping track of movement in space or communication.”

“Alternatively, this surprising ability to encode and process time duration might be a fundamental component of the nervous system that is intrinsic in the properties of neurons. Only further research will be able to address this issue.”

The neural mechanisms concerned within the capability to maintain observe of time for these durations stay principally unknown, because the mechanisms found for entraining with the daylight cycle (circadian rhythms) and seasonal modifications are too gradual to clarify the flexibility to distinguish between a ‘dash’ and a ‘dot’ with totally different length.

Various theories have been put ahead, suggesting the presence of a single or a number of inner clocks.

Now that the flexibility to distinguish between durations of flashing lights has been found in bugs, researchers will be capable to check totally different fashions in these ‘miniature brains’ smaller than one cubic millimeter.

“Many complex animal behaviors, such as navigation and communication, depend on time processing abilities,” mentioned Dr. Elisabetta Versace, a researcher at Queen Mary University of London.

“It will be important to use a broad comparative approach across different species, including insects, to shed light on the evolution of those abilities.”

“Processing durations in insects is evidence of a complex task solution using minimal neural substrate.”

“This has implications for complex cognitive-like traits in artificial neural networks, which should seek to be as efficient as possible to be scalable, taking inspiration from biological intelligence.”

The results had been revealed November 12, 2025 within the journal Biology Letters.

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Alexander Davidson et al. 2025. Duration discrimination within the bumblebee Bombus terrestris. Biol. Lett 21 (11): 20250440; doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2025.0440