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By Root 299 0

on the part of many insects, perhaps particularly honeybees. But scientists are now demonstrating that insects can be taught far more sophisticated tasks, sometimes having no apparent relation to their day-to-day requirements. Recently, for example, Shaowu Zhang and his colleagues trained honeybees to be extraordinarily discriminating in their decision making. The bees were given a reward if they chose a particular pattern on a card, but the "right" choice depended on whether it was morning or afternoon, whether the bees were out visiting flowers or returning to the hive, or a combination of both. The bees took a while to learn their task, but they eventually could make the distinctions, an impressive cognitive feat. Bees from laboratories in both Australia and Germany were tested, and in a happy blow for global diplomacy, turned out to be roughly equal at the task.

But remembering to choose one visual cue over another pales in comparison to another bee achievement: bees can learn to recognize individual human faces. Adrian Dyer at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, and his colleagues there and at Cambridge University in England rewarded honeybees with a sip of sugar solution if they flew toward a particular image, a technique that has frequently been used by researchers. What was novel was the kind of image in his experiments: a black-and-white photograph of a man from a stock collection, compared with a photo of a different person, the same face upside down, and a drawing. Not all the bees got it right, but those that did could remember an individual face several days after their initial training. Dyer isn't suggesting that the bees actually "know" what they are looking at, or that they spend their days scrutinizing the people around them or developing an attachment to the beekeeper. They can't possibly undergo the same cognitive processes that we do when we recognize each other, given their limited nervous systems. Instead, Dyer believes that the ability is probably related to their skill at distinguishing one flower from another while foraging, something more useful in a bee's life. In other words, a bee that can tell a columbine from a daisy could use the same technique to tell a Roman-nosed individual from a snub-nosed one. Dyer went on to demonstrate that honeybees could discriminate among photographs of very similar natural scenes, with images of forests that differed only in the orientation of the branches, an ability that probably makes returning to the hive after a long foraging flight easier to accomplish.

Regardless of how or why they do it, the bees' capacity to learn to recognize human faces has some important implications. Facial recognition has always been one of those skills thought to require a large brain, and psychologists had even speculated that a special part of the human brain is devoted to just that task. But bees don't have any of the same brain components that humans and other vertebrates do, so such a specialized structure must not be necessary to accomplish the discrimination. As Mandyam Srinivasan said, "Sometimes I wonder what we are doing with two-kilogram brains."

In addition to further blurring those boundaries between human and insect, there are some practical uses for the discovery. Computerized facial recognition would be a boon to security and crime-fighting agencies, and studying the mechanisms behind the bees' ability might yield insights into how to create such programs. I was seized by the image of a chamber with a bee at airport security, for instance, scrutinizing the faces of passengers to look for matches with photos of known terrorists. Whether this would work better than some of the current efforts is an interesting question.

Some humans themselves cannot distinguish among human faces, a condition known as prosopagnosia, or face blindness, thought to be due to a genetic defect; one estimate claims that 2.5 percent of the population suffers from some form of it. Some people with prosopagnosia can distinguish individual animals, but not people; Jane Goodall is