IQ of a Bee: How Smart Are Bees Compared to Humans?

7 min read · IQ Tester

There's no real IQ of a bee, because IQ tests are built for humans who can read questions and pick answers. But if you measure bees on what they can actually learn, they're way smarter than their size suggests: honey bees can count small numbers, grasp the idea of "zero," and bumblebees can learn to roll a ball to a goal for a sugar reward, all with a brain of under a million neurons.

So the honest answer to "what is the average IQ of a bee?" is: no number, but a surprisingly long list of skills.

If a bee can learn a new trick in an afternoon, you can definitely figure out which of your own reasoning skills needs work, and IQ Tester shows you exactly that: Find my weak spots.

What is the IQ of a bee?

An IQ score compares one human against a big group of other humans taking the same test. The scale is set so the average person scores 100. You can't hand a bee a test booklet, so any "IQ of a honey bee" number you see on TikTok or Reddit is made up for vibes.

What scientists do instead is run a bee intelligence test: a small, controlled setup where a bee gets sugar water for picking the right option. Then they change the setup to see whether the bee learned a rule or just memorized one spot.

That second part is the key. Memorizing "the blue flower has sugar" is easy. Learning "pick whichever card has fewer dots" is a real concept, and bees can do it.

Bee brain size, quick context

• A honey bee brain has roughly 960,000 neurons. You have around 86 billion.
• The whole thing is smaller than a sesame seed.
• Even so, bees learn colors, shapes, smells, routes and simple rules.

How smart are bees compared to humans?

Let's be real: a bee is not doing your calculus homework. Compared to humans, bees lose on almost everything we'd call "intelligence," like language, planning years ahead or writing a group-chat roast.

But "how smart are bees compared to humans" is a slightly unfair question. A better one is: how much do bees do per neuron? On that measure, they're kind of goated.

How smart are bees compared to other animals?

Among insects, bees are near the top for learning in experiments, which is why they show up in so many "smartest insect" lists. Against big-brained animals like crows, dolphins or apes, bees can't keep up on flexible problem solving. But the fact that they can do any of these tasks with so few neurons is what makes researchers excited.

Bees that count and roll balls

This is where bee intelligence gets genuinely wild.

Can bees count?

Yes, in a basic way. In classic experiments, honey bees were trained to fly past a certain number of landmarks to find food. When researchers moved the landmarks closer together, the bees still tended to stop after the same number of landmarks, not the same distance. That suggests they were tracking "how many," not just "how far."

Do bees understand zero?

A 2018 study in Science by Scarlett Howard and colleagues trained honey bees to choose the card with fewer shapes. When the researchers then showed a blank card, the bees tended to treat "nothing" as less than one. That's a concept human kids take a few years to get.

Bees rolling balls

In a 2017 study, also in Science, researchers trained bumblebees to move a small ball into a target to get a sugar reward. Bees that watched a trained bee do it learned faster, and some even improved on what they'd seen by picking the ball that was closer to the goal.

Later research went further: bumblebees were filmed rolling balls with no reward at all, which some scientists describe as play. Bees. Playing. With tiny balls. Honestly iconic.

Honey bees vs bumble bees

People search "how smart are honey bees" and "how smart are bumble bees" like they're the same animal. They're related, but they live very different lives.

How smart are honey bees?

• Live in huge colonies, often tens of thousands of bees.
• Famous for the waggle dance, a figure-eight move that tells hive-mates the direction and distance to food. Karl von Frisch decoded it and shared a Nobel Prize in 1973.
• Strong at learning rules in lab tests, like "same" vs "different."

How smart are bumble bees?

• Smaller colonies, fuzzier bodies, can fly in colder weather.
• Star of the ball-rolling and social-learning studies.
• Each bumblebee does a lot of solo foraging, so individual learning matters a ton.

Neither is "smarter" overall. They're tuned for different jobs.

Hive intelligence

Here's the twist: some of the most impressive bee intelligence doesn't live in any one bee.

When a honey bee colony needs a new home, scout bees fly out, check possible sites, and come back to dance for their favorite. Better sites get more enthusiastic dances, more scouts go check them out, and eventually the swarm agrees. Biologist Thomas Seeley wrote a whole book about this called Honeybee Democracy.

No single bee sees the full picture. The "decision" comes from thousands of tiny votes. That's swarm intelligence, and it's the same idea we dig into in our post on the IQ of an ant, where the colony matters even more than the individual.

Trying to judge your own strengths by vibes is like one scout bee guessing for the whole hive. IQ Tester gives you a structured read instead: 20 untimed questions across number series, verbal analogy, logic and pattern, so you can see which of the four is pulling you down. Find my weak spots

What tiny brains say about intelligence

The biggest lesson from bee research: brain size isn't the whole story. How a brain is wired, and what it's built to do, matters a lot. You see the same theme with sharks in our IQ of a shark breakdown.

For you, that means a few things:

1. Specific skills beat general "smartness." Bees are elite at learning what pays off in their world. You can get elite at the specific reasoning types you practice.
2. Rules > memorizing. The impressive bee experiments are the ones where they learned a rule, not a single answer. Same with exams: learning why a pattern works beats memorizing one worked example.
3. Small, repeated practice works. Bees get better trial by trial. A short daily drill does more than one panic cram before your test (or your revision session, if you're in the UK).

So, what's the final IQ of a bee?

There isn't one, and anyone giving you a number is guessing. But "are bees intelligent?" gets a confident yes. They count, learn concepts, copy each other, and possibly play, with a brain smaller than a seed.

Spot your own weakest skill in a few minutes

You can't give a bee an IQ test, but you can take one yourself. IQ Tester takes about as long as a short study break: 20 untimed questions in four categories, then your band and three of your four category strengths for free. Then the guides give you one short drill a day on the skill that needs it most.

Find my weak spots

FAQ

What is the average IQ of a bee?

There's no average IQ of a bee, because IQ tests only work for people. Researchers test bee intelligence with reward-based tasks instead, and bees do surprisingly well at counting, learning rules and copying other bees.

Are bees smarter than other insects?

Bees are among the best-studied insects for learning, and they perform strongly in lab tests. Ants are also impressive, especially as colonies. "Smartest insect" depends on which skill you're measuring.

Can bees really understand zero?

A 2018 study found honey bees trained to pick "fewer" shapes tended to rank an empty card below a card with one shape. That suggests a basic grasp of zero as a quantity, though scientists still debate exactly what the bees understand.

How smart are bumble bees compared to honey bees?

They're smart in different ways. Bumblebees shine in individual learning tasks like ball rolling, while honey bees are famous for the waggle dance and group decisions. Neither is clearly smarter overall.

Is there a bee intelligence test I can try?

Not one built for humans, but you can test your own reasoning with IQ Tester. It's for entertainment, not a clinical assessment, and it shows which of your four reasoning categories is strongest.