Honeybees Can Distinguish a Monet from a Picasso

Honeybees are good visual learners, and for some time it's been known that they can distinguish colors, shapes, and patterns. They can also recognize landscape scenes, flowers, and even human faces.

What are the limits of these abilities? Scientists constructed an experiment to test whether honeybees could recognize individual human artistic styles, such as the Impressionist paintings by Monet vs. Cubist or semi-abstract paintings by Picasso.

 

The findings show that they can learn to recognize and distinguish one style from another. They can generalize complex visual features even in images they've never seen before.

Given the relatively small size of the bees' brains, which weigh less than a milligram and contain just 960,000 neurons, the scientists argue that this appears to arise from a basic ability to "extract and categorize the visual characteristics of complex images" and is not a "higher cognitive function that is unique to humans."
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Scientific paper: Honeybees can discriminate between Monet and Picasso paintings

Related: Preference for and discrimination of paintings by mice