Flexible, abstract rhythm perception in bumblebees

Flexible, abstract rhythm perception underpins human music, dance, and speech, but has only been demonstrated in a few select birds and mammals. Here, we show that bumblebees also form robust abstract rhythm representations. Free‑flying bees learned to discriminate two arbitrary repeating flashing light sequences, balanced to preclude the use of any local cues. Bees successfully recognized these learned rhythmic patterns at novel, faster, and slower tempi. Bees trained on vibrational patterns transferred their learning to equivalent flashing light patterns, demonstrating cross-modal rhythm perception. These findings reveal that even an insect brain can encode and generalize arbitrary complex temporal patterns, suggesting that abstract rhythm perception can emerge from relatively simple neural architectures and pointing to deep evolutionary roots for a domain‐general rhythm cognition across animals.