Decision making process of honeybees could inform design of robots

Led by Dr HaDi MaBouDi from Sheffield University’s Department of Computer Science with Professor Andrew Barron from Macquarie University in Sydney, the study has uncovered the complex strategies that honeybees use to decide which flowers to explore for nectar or pollen.

The study found that honeybee decisions are highly accurate - more so than humans - despite their brains being the same size as a sesame seed. The team’s findings have been published in eLife.

The Sheffield scientists said a new generation of robots and autonomous machines that think like bees will be able to make fast, accurate and efficient decisions autonomously. 

In the study, the researchers trained 20 bees to recognise five different coloured artificial flowers. Blue flowers contained sugar syrup, green flowers contained tonic water with a bitter taste that bees dislike, and the remaining colours sometimes had glucose. 

The team then introduced the bees to a custom-designed garden where the flowers only had distilled water to test their performance in different scenarios. The researchers filmed each bee then tracked their path and timed how long it took them to decide on which flower to visit.