Bees, Numbers, and the Strange Possibility of Talking to Aliens

Why Space Keeps Pulling at Us

Humans have always stared upward and wondered. Not casually, either. This is the kind of wondering that lingers, that nags at the back of the mind while we’re washing dishes or stuck in traffic. Are we alone? And if we aren’t, what exactly is out there?

Not just what is out there, but who. Or maybe what kind of intelligence.

Because intelligence doesn’t have to look like us. That idea alone already complicates things.

Even on Earth, intelligence comes in forms we still struggle to fully understand. Octopuses solve puzzles but live short, solitary lives. Ravens plan ahead. Dolphins recognize themselves in mirrors. And then there are bees tiny brained insects that somehow manage complex social coordination, navigation, and, surprisingly, math.

That last part matters more than it sounds.

When people imagine contact with extraterrestrial life, they often picture language barriers as the main obstacle. Different sounds. Different symbols. Different meanings. But the problem runs deeper than translation. What if aliens don’t think the way we do at all? What if their brains whatever “brain” even means for them process reality in a way that makes our words meaningless?

That’s where mathematics enters the conversation. Not as a cold abstraction, but as a possible bridge.

And oddly enough, bees may be quietly helping us test that idea.

Contact, If It Happens, Won’t Be a Handshake

Let’s get one thing straight early: if humans ever make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, it almost certainly won’t involve spaceships hovering over cities or face to face encounters.

The universe is simply too big.

Our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri, sits about 4.4 light years away. Even a message traveling at the speed of light about as fast as anything can go would take over four years to arrive. A reply would take just as long to come back.

So even under wildly optimistic assumptions, a simple “hello” and “hello back” exchange would take close to a decade.

That has consequences.

There’s no room for real time clarification. No immediate feedback. No chance to say, “Wait, that’s not what we meant.” Whatever we send has to be interpretable on its own, by minds that evolved under entirely different conditions.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: what could we possibly send that wouldn’t rely on shared culture, shared senses, or shared biology?

Pictures might fail. Sounds might mean nothing. Even concepts like time or space could be understood differently.

But numbers… numbers might be different.

The Old Idea That Refuses to Go Away: Math as a Universal Language

The idea that mathematics might be universal isn’t new. Galileo famously described the universe as a book written in the language of mathematics. He wasn’t being poetic for fun. He meant it literally. Motion, gravity, planetary orbits these weren’t arbitrary human inventions. They followed patterns that could be expressed numerically.

Science fiction picked up on this idea long ago.

In Contact, extraterrestrials announce their presence using prime numbers broadcast via radio waves. In The Three Body Problem, math becomes a medium of exchange, a shared puzzle that proves intelligence without relying on language. Arrival takes the idea further, imagining aliens whose experience of time reshapes their mathematics entirely.

Even real scientific efforts lean heavily on numbers.

The Voyager Golden Records, launched in 1977, carry etched diagrams explaining how to play the record using binary arithmetic. The Arecibo message, sent in 1974, used a long string of ones and zeros to encode basic numerical concepts, atomic numbers, and DNA structure.

More recently, researchers have tried designing entire symbolic systems binary languages intended to introduce hypothetical aliens to human math, chemistry, and biology step by step.

The assumption behind all of this is simple, but bold: that any sufficiently intelligent species will recognize numbers.

But assumptions, especially comforting ones, deserve testing.

And here’s where bees unexpectedly enter the picture.

Why Bees Are a Surprisingly Good Stand In for Aliens

At first glance, comparing bees to extraterrestrials sounds like a stretch. Bees live on Earth. We see them every day. They pollinate flowers and occasionally sting people who get too close.

Aliens, by definition, are something else entirely.

Yet when you zoom out, the comparison becomes less ridiculous.

Humans and honeybees diverged evolutionarily more than 600 million years ago. That’s a staggeringly long time. Our brains are radically different in size, structure, and organization. Bees have about one million neurons. Humans have roughly 86 billion.

And yet, bees communicate. They cooperate. They make collective decisions. They navigate complex environments.

Their waggle dance a symbolic movement pattern that conveys direction, distance, and quality of food sources is a form of abstract communication that took humans a long time to decode.

From a cognitive perspective, bees are profoundly “other.” If we’re looking for a non human intelligence that didn’t evolve alongside us but still shares some functional overlap, bees are a reasonable place to start.

In that sense, they become a kind of low stakes alien model one we can study without launching a probe into deep space.

What Bees Can Actually Do With Numbers

Between 2016 and 2024, researchers conducted a series of experiments designed to test whether bees could understand numerical concepts.

Not in a metaphorical sense. In a practical one.

The experiments were surprisingly straightforward. Freely flying honeybees were given the choice to participate in outdoor tests, rewarded with sugar water for correct responses. No coercion. No confinement. If a bee wanted to leave, it could.

What emerged was quietly astonishing.

Bees learned to perform basic addition and subtraction. Not large calculations, but operations like “add one” or “subtract one.” They learned to distinguish odd numbers from even ones. They could order quantities from smaller to larger. They even demonstrated an understanding of zero not as “nothing” in a vague sense, but as a numerical concept.

Even more striking, bees learned to associate symbols with quantities. In other words, they could link an abstract visual marker to a number, similar to how humans learn numerals like 2 or IV.

This wasn’t rote memorization alone. The bees showed flexibility, applying learned rules to new situations.

All of this with brains smaller than a grain of rice.

At this point, it becomes difficult to argue that mathematics is purely a human cultural invention.

Small Math, Big Implications

To be clear, bees are not doing calculus. Their math is limited. They operate within narrow parameters.

But that limitation is exactly what makes the findings compelling.

If a species with such a small and differently structured brain can grasp numerical relationships, it suggests that mathematics may not require human like cognition. It may emerge naturally wherever intelligence interacts with the physical world.

The ability to add or subtract one might seem trivial, but conceptually it’s powerful. Once you can increment or decrement, you can, in theory, represent all natural numbers.

That’s a big “in theory,” of course. Bees don’t sit around counting flowers for fun. But the cognitive foundation is there.

Which raises a provocative possibility: if intelligence elsewhere in the universe reaches a certain threshold, mathematics might emerge whether or not that species resembles us in any meaningful way.

Is Math Discovered or Invented?

This question sits at the heart of the debate, and it’s not settled.

Some argue mathematics is discovered that numbers, patterns, and relationships exist independently of us, waiting to be uncovered. Others argue mathematics is invented a human made system that happens to describe reality well.

The bee research doesn’t settle this debate, but it nudges it.

If multiple species independently develop numerical competence, that suggests math may be less like a language we created and more like a structure intelligence inevitably bumps into.

Still, there’s nuance here.

Different species might develop different mathematical “dialects.” Just as languages vary while still being languages, mathematical representations could differ while still pointing to the same underlying truths.

An alien civilization might understand quantity, proportion, or symmetry, but express them in ways that feel deeply unfamiliar.

Math may be universal, but its expression might not be.

The Limits of the Math First Approach

It’s tempting to conclude that mathematics solves the alien communication problem neatly. But that would be premature.

Math can demonstrate intelligence. It can establish that something on the other end of a signal isn’t random. But communication isn’t just about proof. It’s about meaning.

Even with shared numbers, interpretation remains tricky. Does a concept like zero mean the same thing to all intelligences? Does counting imply the same priorities? Does abstraction function similarly?

And there’s another complication: intelligence might not always take the form we expect.

We tend to imagine alien minds as roughly analogous to ours just with different biology. But intelligence could be distributed, collective, or embodied in ways that don’t emphasize symbolic abstraction at all.

Bees, notably, combine individual cognition with collective intelligence. Much of what a hive “knows” exists at the group level, not the individual one.

That alone should give us pause.

Why This Still Matters, Even If We Never Meet Aliens

It’s fair to ask: what’s the practical value of all this?

After all, we might never contact extraterrestrial intelligence. The universe could be full of life that remains forever out of reach.

But the implications don’t stop at space.

Understanding how non human minds engage with abstract concepts forces us to rethink intelligence itself. It humbles us. It reminds us that human cognition, impressive as it is, isn’t the only model.

That has consequences for how we treat other species, how we design artificial intelligence, and how we define consciousness.

Bees don’t just pollinate crops. They quietly challenge our assumptions about who can think and how.

A Quiet Kind of Hope

There’s something oddly hopeful about the idea that mathematics might connect vastly different minds.

Not because it guarantees understanding, but because it suggests common ground might exist even across unimaginable distances.

If bees and humans separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution can both grasp numbers, then perhaps intelligence elsewhere won’t be entirely opaque to us.

That doesn’t mean communication would be easy. Or quick. Or comfortable.

But it might be possible.

And sometimes, possibility is enough to keep us looking up.

Final Thought: The Universe May Be Stranger, and More Familiar, Than We Think

We tend to imagine aliens as radically other. And they probably would be. But the more we learn about intelligence on Earth, the more complicated that picture becomes.

Tiny insects doing math. Plants communicating chemically. Machines learning patterns without understanding them.

The universe doesn’t seem to reserve intelligence for creatures that look like us.

If contact ever happens, it may begin not with words, but with numbers. A quiet signal. A pattern. A shared recognition that something, somewhere, is counting too.

And perhaps, in some distant way, bees have already helped us practice listening.

Open Your Mind !!

Source: ScienceAlert

Open Your Mind