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\n Bumblebees figured out how to get to an out-of-reach reward in a new study, proving they can problem-solve on the fly.<\/p>\n
Mikko T\u00f6rm\u00e4nen\/University of Oulu<\/p>\n
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Mikko T\u00f6rm\u00e4nen\/University of Oulu<\/p>\n
For new discoveries, everyday mysteries, and the science behind the headlines, follow NPR’s ShortWave podcast <\/a>.<\/p>\n Over a century ago, the German psychologist Wolfgang K\u00f6hler conducted what became a classic experiment. He suspended a banana to keep it just out of reach of a chimpanzee, placing a pile of boxes and crates nearby. The chimp soon stacked up the boxes, climbed them and grabbed the treat.<\/p>\n This was evidence, K\u00f6hler believed, of spontaneous problem solving by the chimpanzee; no training was required. It was the kind of thing that humans do all the time.<\/p>\n Since K\u00f6hler’s early work, researchers have conducted similar experiments involving an out-of-reach reward and an object to stand upon in birds<\/a> and elephants<\/a>. And both have solved the problem successfully.<\/p>\n Olli Loukola<\/a>, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Turku in Finland wondered whether bumblebees \u2014 short-lived creatures with miniscule brains \u2014 might be capable of the same task. And in a paper recently published in the journal Science<\/a>, he and his colleagues present evidence that they are.<\/p>\n Untrained bumblebees consistently managed to roll a small Styrofoam ball into a position that allowed them to climb atop it to reach a rewarding stimulus overhead.<\/p>\n “I wasn’t expecting that high success rate,” Loukola says. He concludes that “very tiny brains can solve super complex problems.”<\/p>\n Expecting greatness in the smallest of packages <\/p>\n After studying bumblebees for about a decade, Loukola has come to expect the unexpected. If you don’t have limitations on what’s possible for them, he says, “you can go wild and crazy and find completely novel stuff.”<\/p>\n His early work proved him right. He showed that bumblebees appeared able to “learn to use tools<\/a>,” he says. “They learn socially from each other; they even understand the role of their partner<\/a> in cooperative tasks.”<\/p>\n Loukola has been drawn to studying tasks long considered the domain of animals with backbones. So he decided to see whether his bumblebees might be capable of a variation on K\u00f6hler’s classic experiment of the banana and the box.<\/p>\n But he had to replicate the experiment for an organism that could easily fly to reach its reward.<\/p>\n Loukola, who was at the University of Oulu in Finland at the time, first trained the bees to associate a small blue circle with a sweet treat. “Bees are super fast in associating things together,” he says. “They will learn immediately that blue means reward. Then they start searching for blue stuff.”<\/p>\n He then placed just the blue circle without any sugar water on the ceiling of a hollow puck-shaped container that was about an inch high.<\/p>\n “We designed the arena so that it’s just annoyingly [a] little bit too high for them to stand and reach the ceiling,” he says, “but too tiny for them to fly.”<\/p>\n Loukola video recorded his experiments. “With the videos, you can clearly see what is going on,” he says.<\/p>\n In a recording of the first experiment, a bumblebee is inside the puck alongside a small Styrofoam ball. Remarkably, bee after bee in the video grabs on to the little ball and starts moving it around.<\/p>\n “Bumblebees, they love rolling balls,” says Loukola. “Some of them needed more time and made more errors. But then they continued.”<\/p>\n Eventually, almost three-quarters of the bees moved the ball beneath the blue dot. They then climbed atop the ball, using it like a stepstool to touch the ceiling and reach the otherwise unreachable reward.<\/p>\n “I planned the experiment so that it’s challenging for the bees,” he says. “They really need to understand the task in order to solve it.”<\/p>\n![\"Tomato](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1776365531_369_.jpeg\")
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