![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/bumblebees-on-echinacea-flower-coneflower-SWNS.jpg\")
SWNS<\/p>\n SWNS<\/p>\n
A new study is the first to show that an insect can differentiate between different durations of visual cues.<\/p>\n
In Morse code, a short duration flash or \u201cdot\u201d denotes a letter \u201cE\u201d and a long duration flash\u2014 or \u201cdash\u201d\u2014means letter \u201cT\u201d.<\/p>\n
Until now, the ability to discriminate between \u201cdot\u201d and \u201cdash\u201d has been seen only in humans and other vertebrates, including macaques and pigeons.<\/p>\n
Researchers at Queen Mary University of London 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.<\/p>\n
The short flash \u2013 or \u201cdot\u201d \u2013 was associated with sugar, while the long flash \u2013 or \u201cdash\u201d \u2013 was instead associated with a bitter substance, quinine, that bees dislike.<\/p>\n
At each room in the maze, the position of the \u201cdot\u201d and \u201cdash\u201d stimulus was changed, so that bees could not rely on spatial cues to orient their choices.<\/p>\n
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 their choices were driven by the flashing light, rather than by olfactory or visual cues presented by the sugar.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe wanted to find out if bumblebees could learn to the difference between these different durations, and it was so exciting to see them do it,\u201d said PhD student Alex Davidson in a University press release<\/a>.<\/p>\n Eventually, most of the bees went straight to the \u201ccorrect\u201d flashing light duration previously associated with sugar, irrespective of spatial location of the stimulus\u2014and the study published in<\/a> the journal Biology Letters clearly showed the bees had learned to tell the lights apart based on their duration.<\/p>\n \u201cSince bees don\u2019t encounter flashing stimuli in their natural environment, it\u2019s remarkable that they could succeed at this task,\u201d said Davidson.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAlternatively, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/bumblebee-experiment-Queen-Mary-University-of-London-SWNS.jpg\")
Connected to a wooden nest box where the bees live, acrylic tunnels lead to the observation chamber (left) where two platforms deliver either food or quinine \u2013 Credit: Queen Mary University of London \/ SWNS<\/p>\n