Bumblebees have been found to share a complex cognitive ability with humans.
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00:00If you've ever had to feel your way around a room in the dark, you probably use familiar objects to guide the way.
00:09And in the brain, this task is more complicated than it seems.
00:12How do you know you're touching a light switch without being able to see it?
00:15The answer is in your brain's ability to create mental pictures and make a connection between the feeling of an object and how it looks.
00:22According to Inverse, this kind of intelligence was only observed in apes and dolphins, until now.
00:27A study from Queen Mary University of London found that bumblebees can also remember objects they see or touch.
00:33The experiment gave bumblebees objects of different shapes, a cube and a sphere, with some containing something bumblebees like, sugar water.
00:41Bees who had touched these objects in the dark could recognize them on sight, and bees who only saw the objects through a window could recognize them by touch alone.
00:49Researchers aren't sure exactly how bumblebees use this power, but it's a big new piece in the puzzle of whether or not bees have consciousness.
00:56The study was published in the journal Science.
00:58The study was published in the journal Science.