Honeybees can recognize human faces

Honeybees can recognize human faces. Despite brains smaller than a sesame seed with under 1 million neurons, they learn to distinguish faces in experiments, picking the rewarded face 80% of the time. They use configural processing — assembling parts into a whole — similar to humans. In hives of 50,000, this helps them remember rewarding flowers and routes, not just faces. With 5 eyes and ultraviolet vision, their world looks nothing like ours, yet they solve a task we thought required a mammalian brain.