Scientists have found a relationship between the brain size of bees and their diet

Panurgus Banksianus, a large, furry bee, lives alone, burrowing into sandy meadows across Europe. Prefers

feed on yellow-flowered representatives of the aster family. The big shaggy bee has a very big brain. And a new study explains how it relates to her diet.

Scientists note that compared to the brainIn mammals, the brain of insects has received little attention from scientists, and not much is known about it. In this new study, the researchers sought to partially fill that gap by studying the brains of 395 bees, the brains of 93 species found in Spain, the United States and the Netherlands. Their job was to extract the brain from each specimen and compare its size with other bees, then looking for ways to explain the differences.

The researchers discovered some patterns.For example, bee generation length may correlate with bee brain size. Scientists note that this is not surprising, because the same can be said about birds and many other animals. What really surprised them was the link between diet and brain size. Bees with a less varied diet had larger brains than bees with a varied diet. For most animals the opposite is true. The researchers speculate that this could happen because it would not require much brain energy to eat any flower in the field — identifying specific colors would require much more processing.

The researchers also compared brain size tosocial behavior and found little difference between bees. The brains of single bees were no larger or smaller than those of bees living in complex hives. The researchers note that this was also expected. Unlike most animals, the social behavior of bees is mostly fixed. Bees communicate only in the hive, where they carry out their duties, for example, tending the cubs or collecting pollen.

Researchers have been unable to determine if there were beeswith a larger brain are smarter than bees with a smaller brain; the differences in size seem to be mainly related to the activities that the bees engage in during their life cycle.

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