We all know honeybees appreciate some nice flowers. You could argue that they do it for pollen and nectar, but hey, maybe they just have a good eye for the aesthetics. Maybe you could even call them artsy? A group of researchers might have wondered about the same thing, and they took the thought a step further. In a multi-step learning experiment, they investigated if honeybees could learn the difference between impressionist and cubist paintings.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Claude_Monet_023.jpg

What did they do?

To find out whether honeybees distinguish between artistic styles, just asking them is unfortunately not an option. But the researchers developed a sophisticated assay to still answer their question: They created an experimental chamber that one honeybee at a time could access via a wooden tunnel. In the chamber, photographic prints of an impressionist Monet and a cubist Picasso painting were mounted. By pairing paintings with similar colors and brightness, they tried to minimize the effect of these parameters and focus on the artistic style instead. Below the painting, there was a hole leading to a small chamber. One chamber would contain a feeder; the other one was empty. Of course, the bees could not look into the chamber beforehand. Then, the bees were trained to associate the reward with an artist, half of the bees with Picasso, half with Monet.

First, they tested whether the bees were able to remember exact paintings by showing them the same painting pair multiple times and recording whether bees learned to always select the rewarded one. They then expanded this by training the bees to not one but five painting pairs at a time to see whether bees could remember more than one painting at a time.

Next, the researchers tested whether the bees could transfer the information which art style was rewarded to novel painting pairs. So, first they trained the bees to associate a certain cubist painting with a reward, then they would show them another cubist painting to see whether bees could generalize within the art style.

Results: Honeybees can distinguish between Monet and Picasso paintings

As suggested by the title, the honeybees successfully learned to associate either Monet or Picasso paintings with a reward. When having seen a certain artwork multiple times and receiving sugar water as a reward, they would keep on choosing said painting. This also worked when the bees were trained to multiple paintings.

When the researchers tried to show them new pictures, the success rate decreased, however. Honeybees were less likely to choose the correct artist when encountering a novel painting compared to a previously encountered painting. It seems as if they were not able to generalize the art style across paintings.

Surprisingly, the difference between novel and known paintings was lower when the paintings were shown in grey scale. The honeybees chose the right painting in the novel pairs more than 50% of the time, which is better than chance. The researchers also found some weak statistical support for this generalization.

But what does this mean?

As the researchers showed that honeybees do not rely on luminance, color or spatial frequency information in the paintings, they conclude that honeybees are able to discriminate paintings based on their artistic style. They interpret this as a sign of honeybees´ impressive pattern recognition abilities: the distinction was not based on simple cues but rather on complex stimuli.  However, the researchers were not entirely sure what aspect of the paintings the choices were based on. They could rule out color because they tested also greyscale versions of the paintings, but how exactly the bees distinguish art is to be seen. The study shows that despite their brain being pretty small, honeybees perceive the world in complex ways.

I wonder what going to an art museum with them would be like.

Fun fact

The researchers adapted the methodology from an early study that found that pigeons can do it too! They also know a Monet from a Picasso!

References

Wu, W., Moreno, A. M., Tangen, J. M., & Reinhard, J. (2013). Honeybees can discriminate between Monet and Picasso paintings. Journal of Comparative Physiology A, 199(1), 45–55. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-012-0767-5