A honeybee learns a color in five visits, generalizes matching rules across sensory modalities, and signals food distance to nestmates through dance. How does a brain with fewer than a million neurons achieve cognitive feats that challenge our understanding of intelligence?

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Srinivasan explains that insect compound eyes create a fundamentally different visual world than vertebrate camera eyes. With the two compound eyes too close together for effective stereo vision, bees rely on optic flow, the apparent motion of images across the retina during flight, to gauge distance. His tunnel experiments demonstrated that bees measure distance in units of integrated optic flow rather than absolute meters, which means flying over a featureless lake versus a textured forest pro ...