Honeybees can rank zero as a number, not just recognise 'nothing'

Trained to always pick the image with fewer dots, honeybees offered a real choice against a blank card chose the blank — placing zero below one on a number line, something previously shown only in a few primates and an African grey parrot. Their brains hold under a million neurons, yet they grasped an abstraction humans took millennia to formalise.

— Scarlett R. Howard, Aurore Avarguès-Weber, Jair E. Garcia, Andrew D. Greentree and Adrian G. Dyer, Numerical Ordering of Zero in Honey Bees — Science, vol. 360, 2018

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