Scientists have been able to teach bees to do all kinds of things, like tug on a rope or count to four. But so far these skills have largely fallen into the realm of what scientists might expect is possible. So to really put bees to the test, and figure out exactly how much they can learn, researchers recently taught them a skill they would never need in their natural environment: playing 'soccer.' "This was an attempt to kind of test the limits of bees' cognitive capacity," said Clint J. Perry, a cognitive neuroethologist (he studies animal brains) at Queen Mary University London, who worked on the experiment. "There are no flowers that exist that require a bee to bring a ball into it in order to get a reward." 

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