This is scientific American 60 Second Science. I'm Annie Sneed.

It takes a big brain, a human brain, to do math.

Or so you might assume, but scientists have found that other animals such as chimpanzees, monkeys, and even pigeons can perform some addition and subtraction.

Now, new research shows that the honeybee with a brain the size of a sesame seed can perform basic math.

Researchers put honeybees through 100 trials to try to train them to add and subtract.

They put the bees in a y-shaped maze

and presented them with a certain number of either yellow or blue shapes.

Yellow indicated the bee should subtract, while blue meant they should add.

The bee then entered the decision chamber where it was presented with a correct answer on one side and an incorrect answer on the other side. If they picked the right answer, they were

rewarded with the sugary solution. If not, they got bitter tonic water. The researchers

also put the bees through another test trial without a reward or punishment to make

sure there weren't any scent marks influencing the bees choices.

At first, the bees picked answers at random.

And you see that the ability of the bays to do it starts at about chance level, which is 50%,

showing us that bees are just choosing randomly.

But over time, their confidence comes up to about 80% I think,

so they actually start to perform quite well.

Scarlet Howard, one of the study authors and a postdoctoral research fellow in

neurobiology and cognition at Paul Sabatier University in France. She says the

bees were even able to add and subtract correctly when presented with a number they had never seen before.

The studies in the journal Science Advances.

Things like this can let us know that there's a lot of complexity there and that their brains might not be as simplistic as we once thought.

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