“New research demonstrates that honeybees possess greater cognitive abilities than previously understood.”
Bees can count, recognize human faces, learn from each other, and pass tool-use techniques down through a colony. None of this fits the convenient story that insects are little biological robots, which is the same story that makes it easier to spray fields and shrug at collapsing pollinators. The smarter they keep turning out to be, the harder it gets to pretend the losses don’t matter.