Are humans more intelligent than insects? Yes, we’ve split the atom and landed on the moon, but sometimes — when deciphering the emojis of the US national security adviser — I wonder if we really are that bright.
Both ants and honeybees can count. Ants of the Tunisian desert navigate their way home by counting footsteps and calculating the angle of their path relative to the position of the sun — the same trigonometry that you will find in a GCSE exam, failed by 40.5 per cent of pupils in England last year.
Honey bees have recently been shown to count accurately up to five, understand the concept of zero and also order groups of objects left to right. Scientists call this the “mental number
