Even bees know zero is less than one

Abstract

Across three elegant experiments, Howard, Avarguès-Weber, Garcia, Greentree, & Dyer (2018) demonstrate that honey bees spontaneously generalize an ordinal rule to empty sets, treating zero as less than other whole numbers. Their findings provide strong evidence that bees have a nonsymbolic concept of zero similar to that found in monkeys and human children, suggesting that this capacity may have important evolutionary significance.