When you think of time perception, bees probably aren’t the first creatures that come to mind. Yet a new study suggests these tiny insects may have a surprisingly sophisticated sense of timing that could rival the temporal awareness of mammals and birds.
In research published in Biology Letters, scientists from Queen Mary University of London and Nanyang Technological University found that bumblebees can distinguish between flashes of light that last mere fractions of a second.
The discovery hints that even insect brains, though tiny, can process the passage of time in ways far more flexible than previously understood.
“Our results show that bumblebees can learn to discriminate between visual stimuli of different durations presented as flashing lights to guide their foraging choices,” the researchers write.
Time perception plays a crucial role in survival. It helps animals decide when to forage, hunt, or communicate with others. Circadian rhythms, which govern day–night cycles, are well known.
However, scientists know far less about how insects perceive shorter intervals. These are the seconds or fractions of seconds that matter when avoiding predators or coordinating movement.
To explore this, lead author and PhD candidate at Queen Mary University, Alexander Davidson, and his colleagues designed a free-foraging experiment where bees were trained to associate flashes of light with a sweet reward.
The researchers tested whether bees could distinguish between short and long durations, such as half a second versus two and a half seconds. They also tested this when both lights flashed the same total amount over time, removing brightness as a cue.
The results revealed that the bees consistently learned to discriminate between the two, regardless of whether the “short” or “long” light was rewarded.
“Since bees don’t encounter flashing stimuli in their natural environment, it’s remarkable that they could succeed at this task,” Davidson said in a press release. “The fact that they could track the duration of visual stimuli might suggest an extension of a time processing capacity that has evolved for different purposes, such as keeping track of movement in space or communication.”
The team tested 41 bumblebees across two main experiments. The insects were housed in temperature-controlled wooden nest boxes connected to transparent chambers. The bees had free access to the observation chamber, while access to the experimental chamber was controlled through clear acrylic tunnels with removable doors.
In the test chamber, bees faced two circles of yellow light—one flashing for a longer period and the other for a shorter burst. When a bee correctly chose the duration linked to a sugar reward, it was allowed to feed. Choosing the wrong one meant tasting a bitter quinine solution instead.
Once the bees reached a success rate of at least 15 correct choices out of 20 trials, the rewards were removed to test whether they had truly learned the pattern. Even without sugar, most bees continued to pick the correct flash duration.
“Bees learnt to discriminate between the stimuli both when the short and when the long stimulus was rewarded, showing that they were not driven only by spontaneous preferences and phototaxis,” the researchers write. This rules out the possibility that the bees were simply attracted to one type of light over another.
Interestingly, location mattered slightly. Bees performed slightly worse in the chamber farthest from the nest, a small effect that the authors suggest may be related to distance. Still, the timing skill itself held firm.
Humans and other vertebrates are thought to track short durations using neural “pacemakers”—brain cells that pulse rhythmically to measure seconds. But how insects do it remains an open question.
In vertebrates, such timing involves neural circuits that act like biological stopwatches, counting pulses between a start and end signal. Whether bees use a similar system or a simpler, distributed network of neurons is unclear.
“This points to a general learning ability in bees that can extend temporal processing to novel visual situations,” the researchers write.
Previous studies have hinted that bees can predict when flowers will replenish nectar or even anticipate rewards after several seconds. However, those behaviors could have been shaped by ecological familiarity—the natural lessons learned from flowers and daylight.
By contrast, the new flashing-light experiments use completely artificial cues, proving that bees can generalize timing beyond natural contexts.
One of the study’s most intriguing implications is the potential overlap between time and space processing in insect brains. Bees are already known to use visual flow—the rate at which objects pass by during flight—to gauge speed and distance.
The researchers suggest that the ability to sense timing might share the same underlying neural machinery.
“Visual stimuli that intermittently appear in time might have similarities with the stimuli that flow across space during motion,” the researchers write. “A connection between the neural encoding of time and space has already been identified in vertebrate species. Future studies should explore the underlying basis of time encoding and its connection to space processing in insects.”
If true, this would mean that the tiny nervous systems of bees use a unified, flexible strategy to navigate both dimensions—time and space—critical for survival.
Past research has shown that bees exhibit sophisticated foraging and learning abilities, ranging from tracking nectar renewal times to learning temporal intervals associated with rewards. The new study contributes to this understanding by demonstrating that bees can also discriminate brief durations in flashing light stimuli.
The Debrief has previously covered research showing that bees’ cognitive abilities extend far beyond instinctual foraging, including findings that humans and bees share genetic variants linked to social interaction and “hive-mind”–like coordination. These insights paint a picture of an insect with far more mental flexibility than its small brain suggests.
By demonstrating that bees can also discriminate durations lasting just a few seconds, Davidson and his colleagues have added yet another dimension to this emerging view of bee intelligence.
“The ability to track temporal variables like duration and frequency in a non-naturalistic setting highlights a level of cognitive flexibility that warrants further investigation at the behavioural, computational and neural levels,” the researchers note.
The team suggests that future studies may reveal whether similar timing mechanisms govern how bees process spatial cues, or whether time perception in insects arises from entirely different neural computations.
For scientists studying animal cognition, the bumblebee remains an intriguing subject. Although the study does not directly examine neural architecture, its findings demonstrate that bees can solve timing tasks using artificial visual cues—evidence of cognitive flexibility that continues to surprise researchers.
By demonstrating that bumblebees can perceive and respond to very small differences in timing, the study reveals a level of temporal cognition that extends beyond natural foraging cues.
Researchers note that these findings open new paths for studying how insect nervous systems encode time, offering a framework that could inform future research into temporal processing in both biological organisms and artificial systems.
“Processing durations in insects is evidence of a complex task solution using minimal neural substrate,” co-author and psychology professor, Dr. Elisabetta Versace, adds.
“This has implications for complex cognitive-like traits in artificial neural networks,” she says, “which should seek to be as efficient as possible to be scalable, taking inspiration from biological intelligence.”
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com