Bees -- Good For More Than Just Honey

There's some interesting facial recognition research just out of Monash University in Australia -- and I'm not talking about research on human faces. Instead, scientists have proven that honeybees can distinguish between two faces. Yes, honeybees.

In the study, performed over two years in Australia and Germany, researchers trained different groups of bees to fly toward human faces printed on a vertical screen. Bees that made the correct choice were rewarded with sugar or a bitter solution for incorrect decisions, and over the course of a day or so, bees had learned the task.

The groundbreaking discovery came later when only the bees that had experienced multiple views of a face at both 0 and 60 degrees were able to correctly identify the same face at the rotational angle of 30 degrees in non-rewarded tasks. According to Dyer, this demonstrates a bee's tendency to solve rotational problems by either averaging previously-seen images or mentally rotating previously learnt views.

"Bee brains clearly use image interpolation to solve the problem. In other words, bees that had learnt what a particular face looked like from two different viewpoints could then recognize a novel view of this target face. However, bees that had only learnt a single view could not recognize novel views," Dr. Dyer said.

This is exciting news considering most artificial intelligence recognition systems have major difficulties in reliably recognizing faces from different viewpoints.

"What we have shown is that the bee brain, which contains less than one million neurons, is actually very good at learning to master complex tasks. Computer and imaging technology programmers who are working on solving complex visual recognition tasks using minimal hardware resources will find this research useful," he added.

Turns out honeybees may be useful for more than honey and flower pollination (and of course, their tremendous dance moves).