Honeybees can learn to recognise human faces, studies show

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Honeybees can be trained with sugar rewards to recognise human faces and can later pick out the same face from new angles and among unfamiliar faces. A 2010 study in the Journal of Experimental Biology found bees use configural processing, arranging features in correct spatial relationships, to sort simplified face-like patterns. They dismissed low-level cues like centre of gravity or spatial frequency.

Another study showed bees discriminated a target face from distractors with over 80% accuracy. When trained faces were rotated 180 degrees, performance dropped sharply, mirroring a known quirk in human vision. Retests two days later showed memory held, with one bee scoring 93.9% then 79.2%. The researchers concluded the tiny bee brain, lacking specialised face-processing regions, can achieve genuine facial recognition through training.