Sweet work! How bees use their ball skills to get sugary treats

Most of us love a sweet treat - but when it comes to bumblebees they'll work harder than most to get one.

A new study has found that these bees will use tools they've never been trained with to solve complex problems, if they would receive something sugary as a reward.

The researchers even found that some of the bees were so sneaky they cheated to get straight to the reward, skipping the problem altogether.

The results of the study have now been published in the journal, Science.

In a series of experiments, bumblebees were divided into groups and put through a series of tests.

The tests were designed to be different anything they would have faced in their natural environments.

In each test the bees needed to roll a ball into the correct hole in the ground, and if they managed it, they could climb onto the ball to drink sugar water from a fake flower.

The test was built so that the bees couldn't fly or hover under the flower to drink from it and couldn't reach it from standing on the floor.

The bees weren't taught how to use the ball to get to the flower - but 16 of the 22 bees the tested successfully rolled the ball into the right pit and got to enjoy the sugar water.

The researchers are already planning new experiments to see if they can understand more about how the bees approach problem solving.

Olli Loukola, behavioural ecologist at the University of Turku in Finland and co-author of the study, said: "We weren't interested in instincts in their behaviour; we were interested in their flexibility in decision-making."

Although not every bee was successful Olli says that doesn't necessarily mean those bumblebees are less intelligent than the others - some of the bees might have just lacked motivation, or have been too stressed or hungry to do it.

In fact, he thinks some of the bees that didn't complete the ball-rolling test may have actually outsmarted the others, by figuring out that they could just hang off the ceiling and try to drink from the flower, without needing to use the ball at all.

Sneaky bees!