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Bees have joined an elite group in the animal kingdom: they know what zero means. In some recent research bees were able to place zero in the correct number order in the sequence 0<1<2<3<4<5<6... Understanding zero in humans comes in four stages. First is the recognition that zero is the absence of something, which arrives in early stages of visual processing. A baby quickly understand that there is no food on their plate as opposed to a plate full of yummy combustibles. The second state is understanding that "nothing" is actually "something" as in the absence of light at night is a sensible condition. The third state is recognizing that nothing--zero--has a numerical value. This is the stage bees have reached in the experiment where they place zero at the low end of the positive number line. The fourth stage is what humans have reached in understanding zero. The number zero can be used in complex mathematical expressions and as a place holder in counting. This last stage was not reached until the first millennium BCE of human cultural development.
The Maya civilization was probably the first to use the concept zero fully in their complex calendar calculations . The Mayans represented zero with a shell glyph. The Chinese, Greeks and Romans did not use zero. A record for zero as a written symbol appeared in 628 AD when Indian mathematician Brahma Gupta noted it in his book,
Brahmasputha Siddhanta. that provided rules for calculations using zero. The current Arabic symbol for zero did not reach Europe until about 1200 AD. [photo credit: S. Howard]
Researchers took a day to familiarize bees with numerical cognition through positive reinforcement with sugar, after which the bees placed the concept zero in the proper order of a sequence of six numbers. Bees soon learned to choose a blank space--zero--as opposed to a space containing the concept of a non-zero number. Accuracy increased as bees were asked to choose between numbers with greater difference.
The research makes clear that brain size and complexity does not fully determine what humans recognize as "intelligence".
