They lead apparently simple lives flitting from flower to flower in search of nectar, unconcerned by the cares which bedevil more complicated beings.  

But it has emerged that bees may be guilty of as much fuzzy thinking as people are and forget what they were doing in a way once thought to be uniquely human.  

And researchers believe that the buzzing insects thought processes may be more complicated than is currently believed – and capable of processing information in a similar fashion to people.    

To understand bees’ thought processes, Psychologists at the University of Stirling carried out a number of experiments designed to find out if the yellow-and-black creatures had one-track minds.   

The scientists presented a variety of stimuli to bumblebees captured in the wild, and found they creatures were capable of misremembering key details - a key component of the episodic memory system which many psychologists argue is uniquely human. 

To test out how a bee remembers things, wild bumblebees were presented with coloured objects soaked in tasty sucrose, such as an orange strip of paper or a yellow, rounded paper stick. 

After a short period of time the bees were presented with four objects – one which they had already seen; one made up of two of features of the objects presented previously; one with only one feature of the objects; and a completely new object. 

A bumblebeeA bumblebee (Image: NQ)

The bees then selected one of these objects by exploring it with their antennae or proboscis. 

Across a range of randomised trials, the bumblebees often remembered to go to the original object to seek out the sucrose, but they also made mistakes by selecting a similar one of a different shape or colour. 

In the trials, the bumblebees made the same mistakes that humans would make in similar tasks – with the memory errors characteristic of a type of memory and style of thinking argued to be uniquely human – the ability to remember past events, for example a recent holiday. 

Dr Gema Martin-Ordas, who carried out the study at the University of Stirling, said: “In humans, the recombination processes that are critical for memory recollection are argued to make memory prone to errors that arise from mistakenly combining elements of stored episodes. 

“In this context, memory conjunction errors are usual forms of memory distortions, and the results presented here show evidence of bees spontaneously making memory conjunction errors. 

“If conjunction mistakes made by bees in the present studies indeed arise from erroneously merging elements of the to-be-remembered items, then one would be tempted to conclude that bees’ memories are also constructive. 

“It is completely plausible to expect that these types of errors are present in bees because their natural lifestyle involves encoding and retrieving features from several stimuli, for example flowers.” 

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The experiments involving 50 bumblebees were conducted in June and July 2022. Thankfully, no bees were harmed in the study as the objects were presented to the flying pollinators while they were housed in transparent plastic tubes, and all of them were released back into the wild. 

Dr Martin-Ordas, who is a senior lecturer in the University of Stirling's Faculty of Natural Sciences added: “The findings tantalisingly suggest the presence of constructive processes in bees’ memories, although more research is needed. 

“Memory error paradigms, like the one presented here, offer an interesting avenue of research to examine episodic memory from a new approach since constructive processes can be used to combine and recombine elements of past events to imagine future ones. 

“The comparative field of episodic memory is, therefore, ripe for being taken beyond our established paradigms and old debates, and into a more mature and constructive phase.” 

Dr Martin-Ordas research paper, titled ‘The constructive nature of memories in insects: bumblebees as a case study’ was published in the journal Philosophical Transactions.