The honey bee as connoisseur
October 29 2012
Picture: Ahomina.com
'Buzzzz. It's a Picasso'. I'm grateful to Bullet Shih of Ahomina.com for alerting me to a bizarre but seemingly true scientific research paper on the art historical skills of honeybees. Despite what you might think, this doesn't seem to be a hoax. Bullet writes:
While artist elephants and orangutans have made headlines over the past century, it is now honey bees who are making headlines for having the critical eyes to differentiate between works done by Picasso and those done by Monet. In a study done by researcher Dr. Judith Reinhard at the The Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) at The University of Queensland Australia (UQ) she found that,
"honeybees had a highly developed capacity for processing complex visual information, and could distinguish landscape scenes, types of flowers, and even human faces…[the study] found honeybees had remarkable visual learning and discrimination abilities that extended beyond simple colours, shapes or patterns."
If you don't believe any of this, read the report itself, which is titled, 'Honeybees can discriminate between Monet and Picasso paintings'. And there's more from the University of Queensland here.
