Honeybees can recognize and remember individual human faces.

In 2005, researcher Adrian Dyer published a study in the Journal of Experimental Biology about bee vision. He trained honeybees to pick out specific human faces from photographs. The bees received sugar water for choosing the correct face and a bitter liquid for the wrong one.The bees identified the correct faces more than 80% of the time. They succeeded even when researchers changed the photo colors or backgrounds. This showed that a large brain is not necessary for complex recognition tasks. Bees see a face as a map of shapes and spaces rather than one single image.This is similar to how digital facial recognition software works. Research from Monash University in 2010 found that bees could remember these faces for several days. This skill likely started as a way for bees to tell different flowers apart. Flowers have complex patterns that bees must remember to find food.Bees use this pattern recognition to navigate their environment. It helps them find their way back to the hive after flying long distances. This ability shows that insects can perform high-level thinking tasks.