For decades, scientists dismissed insects as creatures of instinct or biological automatons that buzzed and foraged through reflex alone. But a new study suggests that the humble bumblebee may be far more perceptive than once believed, capable of something previously thought to be limited to larger-brained species—processing time itself.
Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have discovered that bumblebees can distinguish between short and long flashes of light and can use that information to guide their search for food.
The finding marks the first evidence that insects can perceive and act upon time duration—a feat once reserved for humans and other vertebrates such as pigeons, macaques, dogs, and mice.
Alex Davidson, a doctoral researcher who co-authored the study with his supervisor Elisabetta Versace, told CNN that humans still do not fully comprehend time.
“It’s such a fundamental part of our lives and the lives of all animals. I think this study is really interesting because it shows that it’s not just a human question.”
To explore this, the team designed a maze for the bees to navigate after leaving their nest in search of food. Inside, they encountered two circles—one flashing briefly and the other glowing for several seconds.
The shorter flash led to a sweet reward, while the longer flash revealed a bitter one. The circles were also in different positions in every room of the maze. Over time, the bees learned to associate the duration of light with the better treat and consistently flew toward the short flash.
“We wanted to find out if bumblebees could learn the difference between these different durations, and it was so exciting to see them do it,” said Davidson.
That excitement stemmed from how alien this kind of task is to bees. They don’t encounter flashing lights in nature; their world is one of flowers, shadows, and sunlight. The fact that they could recognize and act on differences in timing suggests an unexpectedly refined internal clock.
“Since bees 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.”
The experiment was repeated under various conditions, including trials where no food was present, ensuring that the bees weren’t guided by scent or other sensory cues. What emerged was clear evidence that the bees were using the passage of time itself as a clue.
“And so in this way, we show that the bee is actually processing the time difference between them to guide its foraging choice,” Davidson said.
“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,” he added.
For Versace, who is also a senior lecturer in psychology at Queen Mary University of London, the implications go far beyond foraging. “In the past, it was thought that they were just very basic reflex machines that don’t have any flexibility,” she said.
“We were happy to see that, in fact, the bees can process stimuli that, during the course of evolution, they have never seen before. They’re able to use novel stimulus they have never seen before to solve tasks in a flexible way. I think this is really remarkable.”
This adaptability challenges long-held assumptions about the simplicity of insect brains. With fewer than one million neurons (compared to the roughly 86 billion in a human brain), bees demonstrate that small neural networks can still perform complex tasks such as learning, memory, and even abstract processing of time.
Jolyon Troscianko, a visual ecologist at the University of Exeter who was not involved in the research, agreed that the method shows that bees can learn using information from outside their usual ecological context, “which I find fascinating as it demonstrates how this type of general learning can be achieved with brains many orders of magnitude smaller than the birds and rodents that prior work has focused on.” He added, “Bigger brains are therefore not always necessary to show really impressive cognitive abilities.”
The bees were able to differentiate between flashes lasting half a second and those lasting five seconds. For context, humans rely on the same kind of processing to interpret Morse code, where a short flash communicates an “E” and a long one a “T.”
This study shows “that bees possess a sophisticated sense of time,” said Cintia Akemi Oi, a postdoctoral research fellow at University College London who was not involved in the study.
“This finding makes perfect sense. Bees must carefully manage their time while foraging to maximize rewards and minimize the costs of returning to the nest. Such studies not only help to understand insect cognition but also shed light on the shared and unique features of their neuronal functions, offering valuable insights to the field.”
Understanding how such a tiny brain, less than a cubic millimeter, can distinguish between a dot and a dash could reshape how scientists think about time perception. The neural mechanisms known for circadian rhythms and seasonal cycles operate too slowly to explain this ability. That means bees may rely on faster, smaller-scale timing processes that could shed light on how brains, even artificial ones, manage temporal information.
“Many complex animal behaviors, such as navigation and communication, depend on time-processing abilities,” said Versace. “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.”
Although the precise mechanism behind bees’ time perception remains unknown, Davidson and Versace plan to explore it further. Her team believes studying these “miniature brains” could help refine artificial intelligence, particularly in creating systems that handle time-sensitive information efficiently, like bees do.
“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.”
They also aim to test bees that move freely within colonies to see how group dynamics influence timing and learning.
Interestingly, the researchers also noted that some bees learned to differentiate time durations more quickly than others, suggesting individual variation in cognitive capacity.
Davidson hopes these discoveries shift public perception. “Bees and other insects are not just “essentially driven by instinct,” he said, and are instead “complex animals with inner lives that have unique experiences.”
“In fact, they do have complex cognition—this flexibility in learning and memory and behavior,” he added. Versace agrees, emphasizing that humans should think twice before viewing bees as simple pollinators. “They are not just machines for our purposes,” she said.
The findings, published Wednesday in Biology Letters, could reshape how we think about intelligence itself. For centuries, humans have assumed that size and complexity of brain structure directly correlate with depth of thought, but studies like this suggest otherwise.
The discovery that such tiny creatures can process the abstract concept of time adds to a growing body of research showing that cognition is not the exclusive domain of large, mammalian brains. It’s a revelation that both humbles and inspires. If a bumblebee can grasp the passage of time, perhaps intelligence itself is more widespread and more mysterious than we ever imagined.
Moumita Basuroychowdhury is a Contributing Reporter at The National Digest. After earning an economics degree at Cornell University, she moved to NYC to pursue her MFA in creative writing. She enjoys reporting on science, business and culture news. You can reach her at moumita.b@thenationaldigest.com.
