Bee see, bee do. At least that's the conclusion of research published earlier this month, showing that bumblebees learn to solve problems by watching each other.

In the first study of its kind in insects, scientists constructed experiments that challenged bees to pull strings in order to access rewards of nectar. It's a technique that has long been used to test cognition in various vertebrates, but hadn't yet been tried with insects.

The study was published in early October in the open-access journal PLOS Biology and was led by Lars Chittka from London's Queen Mary University. (Learn about the bees that have just been declared endangered.)

The first step was proving that bees could learn to solve a simple problem. But