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In May 2004, an east Texas logger died after being stung hundreds of times by a swarm of bees. The Beekeepers' Association newsletter cited data from Texas A&M University, saying that bees have killed 15 Texans since 1991. But what if these deaths weren't just accidents? What if the bees had it in for the victims?
A team of European and Australian biologists just reported in the Journal of Experimental Biology that honeybees "can discriminate and recognize images of human faces."
The researchers were curious whether the ability to recognize faces was something only mammals could do. "There is evidence that the mammalian brain may have specialised neural circuitry for face recognition tasks, although some recent work questions these findings," they wrote in the abstract of their paper. "Thus, to understand if recognising human faces does require species-specific neural processing, it is important to know if non-human animals might be able to solve this difficult spatial task."
Apparently they do. They tested honeybees (Apis mellifera) to "evaluate whether an animal with no evolutionary history for discriminating between humanoid faces may be able to learn this task."
Here's what the team found out: "Using differential conditioning, individual bees were trained to visit target face stimuli and to avoid similar distractor stimuli from a standard face recognition test used in human psychology. Performance was evaluated in non-rewarded trials and bees discriminated the target face from a similar distractor with greater than 80% accuracy. When novel distractors were used, bees also demonstrated a high level of choices for the target face, indicating an ability for face recognition. When the stimuli were rotated by 180° there was a large drop in performance, indicating a possible disruption to configural type visual processing."

Image Credit: Smoky River Express, Caption: Area beekeepers (from left) Paul Benoit and Fernando Sanchez were brave during the Bee Beard Contest in last year's Honey Festival.