[arthurus]

I don't think so. The white care is actually "1." It is a recognizable something. It is not nothing- zero. I don't think you can test that way for awareness of "zero". The testers think that because label that card as "zero" and that the bees recognize the unmarked card as "less" than the card with a single mark on it then the bees recognize zero. Bees can be said to recognize less and more, perhaps, but zero? I don't think so.

[Delta 21]

Bees are trial and error creatures just like all of us.

If you provide them with food they seek when they land on the card of your choice, you have done nothing but let them find the exact color of flower that renders the most pollen or nectar.

And your blank cards and ones with symbols and numbers on them look nothing like what you would expect a bee to be looking at for food. They dont even see flowers the same way we do. What do these cards look like under UV light? that will tell you more about what the bee is thinking because its not a plain white paper card to her.

What we see on the left. What the bee sees onthe right.

[no-s]

the bees recognize the unmarked card as "less" than the card with a single mark on it then the bees recognize zero.

The claim presented is that the bees recognized the absence of marks without prior training. Unfortunately the article doesn't really go into how the experiment was set up, or whether it was repeatable, or what theories of variation were tested. So it's more of a conversational factoid. I hate science news that has the intellectual depth of Cosmo sex surveys...