Overview
- Researchers synthesize years of honeybee studies to argue that shared numerical concepts could provide a common basis for interspecies communication.
- Experiments from 2016 to 2024 trained freely flying bees on visual displays and rewards, showing addition or subtraction by one, ordering, odd–even classification, and signs of understanding zero.
- Bees also learned associations between symbols and quantities, suggesting rudimentary number representation without human language.
- The authors note humans and honeybees diverged over 600 million years ago yet both show social communication and basic numerical cognition, supporting cross-species generality.
- The proposal builds on SETI precedents such as the Voyager Golden Records and the 1974 Arecibo message, and it calls for testing how mathematical concepts scale and vary across species.