Dacke Marie, Srinivasan Mandyam V
ARC Centre for Excellence in Vision Science, Research School of Biological Sciences, Australian National University, P. O. Box 475, Canberra, ACT, 2601, Australia.
Anim Cogn. 2008 Oct;11(4):683-9. doi: 10.1007/s10071-008-0159-y. Epub 2008 May 27.
Here we investigate the counting ability in honeybees by training them to receive a food reward after they have passed a specific number of landmarks. The distance to the food reward is varied frequently and randomly, whilst keeping the number of intervening landmarks constant. Thus, the bees cannot identify the food reward in terms of its distance from the hive. We find that bees can count up to four objects, when they are encountered sequentially during flight. Furthermore, bees trained in this way are able count novel objects, which they have never previously encountered, thus demonstrating that they are capable of object-independent counting. A further experiment reveals that the counting ability that the bees display in our experiments is primarily sequential in nature. It appears that bees can navigate to food sources by maintaining a running count of prominent landmarks that are passed en route, provided this number does not exceed four.
在这里，我们通过训练蜜蜂在经过特定数量的地标后获得食物奖励来研究它们的计数能力。食物奖励的距离经常且随机地变化，同时保持中间地标的数量不变。因此，蜜蜂无法根据与蜂巢的距离来识别食物奖励。我们发现，蜜蜂在飞行过程中依次遇到物体时，能够数到四个物体。此外，以这种方式训练的蜜蜂能够数从未见过的新物体，从而证明它们能够进行与物体无关的计数。进一步的实验表明，蜜蜂在我们实验中所表现出的计数能力本质上主要是顺序性的。似乎蜜蜂可以通过对沿途经过的显著地标进行连续计数来导航到食物源，前提是这个数字不超过四个。
