What would it mean if bees could understand the concept of nothing? Bees had already demonstrated they could count. Now, the researchers wrote, bees have shown that they understand the absence of things — shapes on a display in this experiment — as a numerical quantity: none or zero. And the only nonhuman animals so far to pass the kind of test bees did are primates and one bird. There seems to be no question that bees do quite well at the standard understanding-zero experiment, clearly putting them in a cognitive elite.

Source: New York Times June 07, 2018 18:00 UTC