Episode 26: Bees Understand the Concept of Zero

05/20/21 • 30 min

“There are really interesting comparisons we can make between humans and bees, especially considering that we’re separated by over 600 million years of evolution from them. And yet we’re able to do similar things, sometimes in similar ways.”

Scarlett Howard, PhD
Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia

Dr. Scarlett Howard’s research on cognition of honeybees got a lot of media attention when in 2018, she published a paper that showed bees can understand the concept of zero. How Scarlett came to prove this is one of the things we discuss in this episode. The importance of zero is a topic we cover in this same episode with help from Faruck Khan, a mathematician who teaches at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools.

Scarlett is currently working on understanding the effect of urbanization on native and introduced bee species in Australia. Is the presence of people possibly beneficial to some bees? Detrimental? No one yet knows. Her research explores conceptual learning, neurobiology, and visual perception in honeybees as well as insect diversity, pollinator preferences, and plant-pollinator interactions.

How to Find Out More About Bees & Zero

“It’s been said that the development of an understanding of zero by society initiated a major intellectual advance in humans, and we have been thought to be unique in this understanding. Although recent research has shown that some other vertebrates understand the concept of the ‘empty set,’ Dr. Howard’s work shows that an understanding of this concept is present in honey bees. This finding suggests that such an understanding evolved independently in distantly related species that deal with complexity in their environments, and that it may be more widespread than previously appreciated.” So says a 2018 article in Science Magazine that put Scarlett and her work on the map. It’s one of the better places to glean details about the experiments and results. For a less technical rendition, see the article from the New York Times or this one from Quanta Magazine.

In the full interview, Scarlett emphasized that she isn’t working in isolation. Other scientists are working on bee cognition; Dr. Adrian G. Dyer is one of several close collaborators, and the team also includes behavioral researchers, statisticians, color and vision scientists, photographers and theoretical physicists.

How to Find Out More About Scarlett Howard’s Work

To keep up with new information coming out of Scarlett and her colleagues’ work, follow her on Twitter. @TheBeesearcher.

How to Help Scarlett Howard in A Community Science Project

If you live in Australia, check out Bees At Home, a citizen science effort where you upload photos of bees you see out in the wild or in your backyard to Flickr using the hashtag #beesathome. In Australia there over 2,000 species of native bee species yet relatively little is known about them. Each bee photo is a data point that helps Scarlett and her colleagues uncover more information about native bee behavior and distribution. You can follow Bees at Home on Twitter @BeesAtHomeAus, and Facebook.

Here we see a female bee confronting the Existential Void of Nothingness. Or perhaps in this photograph, she’s actually being caught right in the midst of figuring out Scarlett’s math problem. The bee might be thinking, “Is something with no spots upon it at all representing a number that’s smaller than a card that has spots? Or is this something else entirely? Can ‘nothing’ be considered ‘less than,’ or is this a blank slate utterly without meaning?” This is what the math experiments look like. Bees see cards with different amounts of spots on them and are rewarded with sugar water for choosing the correct answer. Here, they’re learning to discriminate between lower and higher quantities. Lasioglossum ...

“There are really interesting comparisons we can make between humans and bees, especially considering that we’re separated by over 600 million years of evolution from them. And yet we’re able to do similar things, sometimes in similar ways.”

Scarlett Howard, PhD
Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia

How to Find Out More About Bees & Zero

How to Find Out More About Scarlett Howard’s Work

To keep up with new information coming out of Scarlett and her colleagues’ work, follow her on Twitter. @TheBeesearcher.

How to Help Scarlett Howard in A Community Science Project

Previous Episode

Episode 25: Think Beyond the Possible

“Protecting biodiversity is a scramble, still a daunting task, but it looks like something that’s within our reach. I find that extraordinarily hopeful and encouraging.”

Tony Hiss, Author

Tony Hiss’s new book, “Rescuing the Planet: Protecting Half the Land to Heal the Earth,” lays out both the urgency for and possibility of protecting 50 percent of the Earth’s land by 2050. This will save millions of species and slow climate change. Tony Hiss discusses what this might look like if it were to happen and he also reflects on his own interesting life and travels.

For thirty years, Tony was a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 1999, Tony wrote a memoir that reflected on what it was like to grow up as the son of Alger Hiss, a government lawyer in the State Department accused of espionage. “He actually went to jail for four years or so,” Tony says of his father. “And he would write me as a way of staying in touch. He’d say, ‘I’m not going to be able to get to Central Park this year, I wish you would go up there and be my eyes and ears.’ That tuned my senses. Writing him letters was probably the reason I became a reporter.”

How to Find Out More About the “Half Earth” Proposal

The wonderful writer and scientist E.O. Wilson is someone who really embodies what Tony Hiss talks about in the show: a “planetary feeling.” He’s behind the Half-Earth Project, an organization promoting this concept.

How to Find Out More About Tony Hiss

Read his books! Tony has written fifteen of them and they’re all in print from major presses and easy to find.

Also you might be interested in reading this review of Tony’s book in the Wall Street Journal.

How You Can Help Save Half the Earth

Here are five things you can do that will matter. Think about accomplishing two. One is to contribute to the organization that’s working hard on making this concept a reality, and the other is to do something directly. You know yourself, and you’ll know which of these you’re best suited for:

Contribute $ to the Half-Earth Project. Do it here.
Seek out a local effort in your community that is physically restoring a natural area. In Chicago, here’s one and here’s another one. Find a group or agency that is cutting brush or pulling weeds or planting seeds or monitoring a population of an endangered species and go out and volunteer your assistance.
Promote educational initiatives that connect students and adults with the natural world and that encourage them to take a tiny step toward becoming a conservation steward.
Advocate for conservation action and collaboration within your community—we here at The Shape of the World can’t know what that looks like for you precisely, but often it’s attending meetings related to city planning and zoning decisions and starting to understand how decisions get made. Over time, you can work your way into participating in committees and commissions that make decisions. Or if that’s not your thing, then you can be a thoughtful advocate who speaks up at meetings. You might be surprised by how easy this is—usually because only a handful of people ever take the time to do any type of citizen involvement at the municipal or county level. And that’s where the rubber really hits the road on this enterprise of protecting biodiversity. People who live near natural areas (or open spaces that potentially could become restored and protected natural areas) have to be paying attention.
Expand the Half-Earth movement culture by sharing your commitment with friends and family and encouraging them to join you in signing the Half-Earth Pledge.

Tony Hiss’s most recent book is available now,
published by Penguin Random House. Mark Anderson and Tony Hiss at Sanderson Brook Falls in 2018

This is a photo Tony took of the trees he describes in the podcast episode, the ones blooming behind his Greenwich Village apartment. ”The top half of this view is all sky — a great, arching, almost Western-sized sky,” he wrote in the book, The View from Alger’s Window.
“Below the sky and neighboring rooftops, there’s a forest-canopy view of a miniature orchard of ten ornamental Japanese crab apple trees.”

Next Episode

Episode 27: The World Is Not Static

“Sometimes you need to be careful to ask the right question because you already have assumptions built in to the questions you’re considering.”

Caitlin Rankin, PhD, RPA
Research Geoarchaeologist
Illinois State Archaeological Survey

Dr. Caitlin Rankin’s research shows that a long-held theory about why an ancient civilization passed out of existence was wrong. Cahokia Mounds in southwestern Illinois was the site of the largest city in North America and at the pinnacle of its population in 1150, was larger than London or Paris. But over two centuries, its population waned.

Until Caitlin’s research findings found otherwise, a prevailing theory had been that residents of Cahokia caused the problem themselves; they caused the location to become uninhabitable because of poor environmental practices. But Caitlin’s examination of sediments on the site found evidence this wasn’t the case. “The people who lived in North America before the Europeans—they didn’t graze animals, and they didn’t intensively plow. We look at their agricultural system with this Western lens, when we need to consider Indigenous views and practices,” Rankin said in National Geographic magazine. (Article by Glenn Hodges, April 12, 2021).

How to Find Out More About Caitlin’s work

Read her academic publication in the journal Geoarcheology. For a less-technical piece, read the article in the New York Times or this one from Washington University in St. Louis (the institution where Caitlin began this line of research when she was a graduate student.

How to Find Out More About Cahokia Mounds

Why not visit and see the site for yourself? Fly into St. Louis, which is only a half-hour from the historic site. Here’s some information. You could combine it with a longer trip to visit other ancient historic sites (including other mounds) in the Midwest; or make it part of a longer trip exploring the Mississippi River. In Illinois, Route 96 hugs the shores of this vast river valley for many miles. Hill prairies thrive on the bluffs.. (Late April and early May are a good time to visit to see spring ephemeral wildflowers, and any day in October is a good time for fall foliage.) 96 is one section of the Great River Road that stretches from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

Additional Information

Note from Jill: “During the interview, when I asked Dr. Rankin about other cities and comparisons of their sizes simultaneous to the period of thriving for Cahokia, she and I spoke about London and Paris. (Two examples of cities that existed concurrently and that were much smaller than Cahokia.) What she and I didn’t cover (because I didn’t get around to asking!) was that during that same period, there were cities on Earth that surpassed Cahokia in size. These included (but weren’t limited to) Constantinople, Baghdad, and Kaifeng.”

Samples of sediments from Cahokia Mounds await analysis in Dr. Caitlin Rankin’s laboratory. A study site at Cahokia Mounds. Here you can see a hint of the different layers of sediments as Caitlin described it in the podcast, Soil is brought to the surface for close examination. The research work site at Cahokia Mounds.