In 2010, researchers revealed that honeybees identify human faces by processing facial features in much the same way people do. Years later, the discovery became an inspiration for developing advanced automatic facial recognition technology

Honeybees have no need to recognize human faces in their everyday lives. Yet researchers found that the insects could learn what makes a face look like a face and use that information to identify unfamiliar images.

The discovery came from experiments published in the Journal of Experimental Biology in 2010. Researchers from Monash University and the Université de Toulouse found that bees were not recognizing individual people. Instead, they were paying attention to the relative positions of features such as the eyes, nose and mouth.