Rather than buzzing around in a random search for nectar, bees think carefully about their foraging trips - and even calculate the amount of energy they need to expend for a given return, dpa reported.
They can also convey this intelligence to other members of the hive by waggling their bottoms a particular way, a researcher at Sydney's Macquarie University said.
"The bee brain has an incredibly simple make-up and yet it appears to possess an onboard calorimeter or stopwatch," Andrew Barron said. "Our study showed that bees can separately calculate distance travelled and foraging efficiency, and communicate both independently using different elements of their dance language."
Barron set up an experiment to see how well bees can estimate energy expenditure and whether they could convey this information to other bees.
He built a 20-metre tunnel, and one half that length, placing feeders at the end of the tunnels to attract the bees. To fool the bees into believing that the closest feeder was actually the one furthest one away, he rigged up a device creating that optical illusion.
"When bees return from a foraging expedition they let the other bees in the colony know where they have been and how good the nectar was by performing what's known as the waggle dance," Barron said.
"The waggle-dance performed by the bees in this study indicated that they were fooled by the illusion and believed that the feeder in the 10-metre tunnel was furthest away. Yet they could still tell somehow that they weren't using up as much energy by flying to that feeder - they favoured that one anyway and advised the other bees to do the same."
The study, written up in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, argued that the bees were definitely not using distance alone to estimate return on effort. However, the study didn't offer an alternative hypothesis.