Experimental Apparatus. On the right is the wooden nest box where bees live. It is connected by acrylic tunnels to the observation chamber at the top of the picture and the three experimental compartments on the left. Bees feed in the observation chamber and those bees that were motivated to feed (active foragers) were chosen for experiments. The experimental compartments are where the bees were presented with the stimuli and solutions (sugar or bitter quinine during training and water during test). Credit: Alex Davidson, Queen Mary University of London

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have shown for the first time that an insect—the bumblebee Bombus terrestris—can decide where to forage for food based on different durations of visual cues. Their paper is published in the journal Biology Letters.

In Morse code, a short duration flash or “dot” denotes a letter “E” and a long duration flash, or “dash,” means letter “T.” Until now, the ability to discriminate between “dot” and “dash” has been seen only in humans and other vertebrates such as macaques or pigeons.

Ph.D. student Alex Davidson and his supervisor Dr. Elisabetta Versace, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Queen Mary, led a team that studied this ability in bees. They built a special maze to train individual bees to find a sugar reward at one of two flashing circles, shown with either a long or short flash duration. For instance, when the short flash, or “dot,” was associated with sugar, then the long flash, or “dash,” was instead associated with a bitter substance that bees dislike.

In each room in the maze, the position of the dot and dash stimulus was changed, so that bees could not rely on spatial cues to orient their choices. After bees learned to go straight to the flashing circle paired with the sugar, they were tested with flashing lights but no sugar present, to check whether bees’ choices were driven by the flashing light, rather than by olfactory or visual cues present in the sugar.

3D model of experimental apparatus. A bee is doing an experimental trial. Its route from the nest box is traced in red through removable plastic doors. In the first experimental compartment the stimuli are displayed on the monitor and plastic chips hold the associated solution (sugar or bitter quinine during training and water during test). The first attempt at feeding from one of the chips is recorded as a choice of stimulus. The bee will continue to the next two compartments for the next trials so that each foraging bout includes three trials. Credit: Alex Davidson, Queen Mary University of London

Bees demonstrate surprising time perception

It was clear the bees had learned to tell the light apart based on their duration, as most of them went straight to the ‘correct’ flashing light duration previously associated with sugar, irrespective of spatial location of the stimulus.

Davidson said, “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.”

“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.”

“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.”

Stimuli. The stimuli are yellow circles, as shown on the left of the picture, that flash on and off for different durations. A schematic of the on (peaks) and off (troughs) states for both stimuli are shown. This representation is taken from the second experiment in which the total amount of light was equal over a five second cycle (2.5 seconds in the on state for each stimulus). Credit: Alex Davidson, Queen Mary University of London

Exploring the neural basis of timing

The neural mechanisms involved in the ability to keep track of time for these durations remain mostly unknown, as the mechanisms discovered for entraining with the daylight cycle (circadian rhythms) and seasonal changes are too slow to explain the ability to differentiate between a dash and a dot with different duration.

Various theories have been put forward, suggesting the presence of a single or multiple internal clocks. Now that the ability to differentiate between durations of flashing lights has been discovered in insects, researchers will be able to test different models in these ‘miniature brains’ smaller than one cubic millimeter.

Versace continued, “Many complex animal behaviors, such as navigation and communication, depend on time-processing abilities. 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.”

More information: Duration discrimination in the bumblebee Bombus terrestris, Biology Letters (2025). DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2025.0440. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi … .1098/rsbl.2025.0440

Citation: Bees learn to read simple ‘Morse code’ (2025, November 11) retrieved 11 November 2025 from https://phys.org/news/2025-11-bees-simple-morse-code.html

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