Bunny-tailed bumblebees (Earth bomb) They can decide where to forage based on different durations of visual cues, according to a new study.
The ability to process temporal information is critical for animal activities such as foraging, mating, and avoiding predators. Although circadian rhythms have been extensively studied, knowledge of how insects process durations in the range of seconds and subseconds is limited. Davidson etc.. whose purpose was to evaluate yellow-tailed bumblebees” (Earth bomb) the ability to distinguish the duration of blinks when freely searching for food. Image credit: Miriam.
IN Morse codea short flash or “dot” represents the letter “E” and a long flash or “dash” represents the letter “T”.
Until now, the ability to distinguish between dot and dash has only been observed in humans and other vertebrates such as macaques or pigeons.
Queen Mary University of London Ph.D. Student Alex Davidson and his colleagues studied this ability in Earth bomb bumblebees.
They built a special maze to train individual bumblebees to find a sugar reward in one of two flashing circles, shown with a long or short flash duration.
For example, when a short flash, or “dot”, was associated with sugar, then a long flash, or “dash”, was instead associated with a bitter substance that bumblebees do not like.
In each room of the maze, the position of the dot and dash stimuli was changed, so that the bumblebees could not rely on spatial cues to orient their choices.
After the bumblebees learned to walk straight to a flashing circle paired with sugar, they were tested with flashing lights but no sugar to test whether the bumblebees' choice was driven by the flashing light rather than the olfactory or visual cues present in the sugar.
It was clear that the bumblebees had learned to discriminate light based on its duration, as most of them immediately went to the “correct” duration of the flashing light previously associated with sugar, regardless of the spatial location of the stimulus.
“We wanted to see if bumblebees could learn to differentiate between these different durations, and it was really interesting to see how they did that,” Davidson said.
“Because bumblebees do not encounter flashing stimuli in their natural environment, it is surprising that they were able to succeed in this task.”
“The fact that they can track the duration of visual stimuli may indicate an expansion of time-processing abilities that have evolved for various purposes, such as tracking movement in space or communicating.”
“Alternatively, this remarkable ability to encode and process time duration may be a fundamental component of the nervous system, an inherent property of neurons. Only further research will address this issue.”
The neural mechanisms involved in the ability to keep track of time during these periods remain largely unknown, since the mechanisms open to interaction with the diurnal cycle (circadian rhythms) and seasonal changes are too slow to explain the ability to distinguish between “dash” and “dot” of different durations.
Various theories have been put forward suggesting the presence of one or more internal clocks.
Now that insects have been shown to be able to discriminate the duration of flashing lights, researchers will be able to test different patterns in these “miniature brains” measuring less than one cubic millimeter.
“Many complex animal behaviors, such as navigation and communication, depend on the ability to process time,” said Dr Elisabetta Versace, a researcher at Queen Mary University of London.
“It will be important to take a broad comparative approach across different species, including insects, to shed light on the evolution of these abilities.”
“The duration of processing in insects demonstrates the solution of a complex task using a minimal neural substrate.”
“This has implications for complex cognitive functions in artificial neural networks, which need to be as efficient and scalable as possible, taking inspiration from biological intelligence.”
results were published on November 12, 2025 in the magazine Letters in Biology.
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Alexander Davidson etc.. 2025. Long-term discrimination in the bumblebee. Earth bomb. Biol. Lett 21 (11): 20250440; two: 10.1098/rsbl.2025.0440
