How do we know the bees don't simply use a learned lookup-table rather than doing arithmetic?
During evaluation, did they present the bees with problems that they didn't see before?
During evaluation, did they present the bees with problems that they didn't see before?
Especially considering how numbers were presented to bees = number of shapes in a square (look at the second paper in my other comment).
Or rather, we can synthesize lookup tables from preexisting lookup tables.
Perhaps by reading the freely available original paper[0], where we find that the bees were tested on samples with randomized positions, and which included shapes previously unseen by bees.
So the bees aren't using lookup tables to count.
We all, though, use lookup tables to map numbers to single digits: that's by definition. The digit 7 represents this many objects: * * * * * *; you need to memorize this after you learn to count.
The experiment doesn't establish the bees' ability to parse decimal notation (mapping numbers to character strings).
[0]https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2019...
This only shows that bees can abstract away from the actual shapes, not that they actually count.
That was basically how i was taught times tables in school as a child, and many others.