Watch these bees play soccer after scientists trained them to score goals

Published Feb. 24, 2017 2:10 p.m. ET

Caitlin Murray

Bees are awesome. They’re super smart, they make honey, and they're responsible for helping keep the human race alive through cross-pollination of crops.

But as great as they are, scientists in London are making them even better: the scientists have taught bees how to play soccer. Sort of.

Queen Mary University of London have been studying the behavior of bumblebees and they’ve trained the bees to put tiny soccer balls into a goal of sorts in order to receive a treat. Take a look:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC9aSP9x0xE

That’s pretty amazing. As project manager Lars Chittka put it: "Our study puts the final nail in the coffin of the idea that small brains constrain insects to have limited behavioral flexibility and only simple learning abilities.”

The bees learned to score goals in different ways, but the bees who learned how to do it from already-trained bees learned the fastest. But what’s remarkable about that is those bees didn’t copy what the trainer bees did — they improved upon it and found more efficient ways to achieve the same result.

If the bees keep this up, look for Arsenal to try to sign some of them in the next transfer window.