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.