Are bees intelligent?


The full aritcle is here :
Italian and Carniolan honeybees on lavendar

Italian and Carniolan honeybees –Photo ©Kathy Keatley Garvey

The other day, Ken and I had coffee with a couple of philosophers who spend their time thinking about philosophy of the mind.  What is consciousness?  Do non-human organisms have consciousness?  What is intelligence?  How do we make decisions?  What about ants?  These are hard questions to answer, perhaps even unanswerable, but they are fascinating to think about.
Our meeting was occasioned by the recent paper in PNAS about the mental map of bees (“Way-finding in displaced clock-shifted bees proves bees use a cognitive map”, Cheeseman et al.).  Cognitive maps are mental representations of physical places, which mammals use to navigate their surroundings.  Insects clearly have ways to do the same; whether or not they do it with cognitive maps is the question.

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