Have you ever imagined what bees can do with their tiny brains? Now scientists are looking into a bee’s brain.

Clint Perry, a scientist, has spent much time studying how bees think. He says studying bees is not very different from studying other animals. “The main difficulty is to design (设计) an experiment (实验) bee and get what we want,” he says. “With humans, we can ask them a question and get an answer. But we can’t use the same way to get an answer from bees. They are just trying to get sugar. Bees like sugar.”

The fact that bees like sugar is helpful for scientists to design experiments. For example, in one experiment, Perry gave bees a task: to find delicious sugar on a landing place above a black bar (棒). Perry made the task easier or harder by moving the landing place farther from or closer to the black bar. He found that bees would avoid the task when it was difficult. And when the task was easy, bees would try it.

As for humans, we might choose not to take a test when we weren’t ready for it. And we might choose to take the test when we were well prepared. In the same way, bees seemed to make decisions like humans.

Perry points out that we are not sure whether bees actually make a thoughtful choice from experiments. Now scientists still do not know how bees manage to do so much with their tiny brains. But learning more about how bees’ brains work could help us learn more about how our own brains deal with information.