How Honey Bees Think

Talk by Andrew Barron, PhD; Macquarie University, AU

Advances in neuroscience are at last giving us insight into what it might be like to think like a bee. The honey bee has evolved as the consummate generalist pollinator, and has become perhaps the most important insect pollinator of our food crops. Here I will talk about how honey bees think, and how we know how they think. I discuss how their thought processes influence their flower choices, and how bees’ long coevolution with flowers has shaped a bee’s type of intelligence and the bee brain.