A challenge long thought to separate humans and a few clever vertebrates from the rest of the animal kingdom has a new and unlikely contender: the bumblebee.
According to a study published in the journal Science in June 2026, researchers in Finland gave buff-tailed bumblebees a problem they would never meet in nature. A sugary artificial flower sat just out of reach, and a small ball lay nearby. To win the treat, a bee had to roll the ball into position and climb onto it as a platform — with no training and no other bee to copy.
Sixteen of the 22 bees tested worked it out on their own. The feat echoes psychologist Wolfgang Kohler’s century-old experiments in which chimpanzees stacked boxes to reach a hanging banana.
The scientists were careful, according to phys.org, to say they are not claiming bees think like people. What a brain smaller than a grass seed can do, though, is invent a solution to a problem it has never seen, and watching it, they admit, was fascinating.
Briefs and quick reads selected and edited by The Smart Reader’s editorial team.
