Humans are social animals, thus the capacity to recognise faces is essential. What if you were unable to tell your boss from your colleague or your mother from your father?
Nevertheless, facial recognition technology is not the ultimate solution for social interaction.
Other ways that many highly social insects, like bees and ants, can distinguish one friend from another (or a foe from a friend) include body language, pheromones, and other chemical cues. Many have concluded that insects are incapable of recognising faces as a result of this.
However, is it true that bees can recognise faces?
It is indeed a fact.
It’s commonly believed that only highly evolved brained animals—usually mammals—are capable of visually differentiating between individuals.
This is wrong since research has demonstrated that, despite having less developed neural networks, bees and wasps can process and recognise various faces.
Not only can bees recognise faces, but the mechanism underlying this ability is even the same in humans, according to scientific research!
The concept of holistic processing allows humans to distinguish between different faces. We combine the various parts of a face, such as the mouth, nose, eyes, and so forth, to create a distinctive “whole” that can be recognised.
The fusiform gyrus is a particular area of our brain that is used for these kinds of visual categorization tasks.
Even though they don’t have highly developed brains, research indicates that bees and wasps can recognise target faces with up to 90% accuracy because they use the same “patchworking” of features as humans.
Associate Professor Adrian Dyer of RMIT University claims that the insects could even recognise human faces in black and white.
According to ethologist James Gould, this could contribute to bees’ ability to recognise different types of flowers.
Gould continues, “Faces are just a really strange looking flower” for bees, despite the fact that humans have to be able to distinguish faces for social and evolutionary reasons.
Nevertheless, these findings imply that the capacity to carry out complex tasks is not correlated with brain size or sophistication. Put differently, our conception of “intelligence” might be seriously erroneous.
Although you may not be able to distinguish individual bees, the bees are able to recognise you!
