Bees understand nothing

I have often said, and heard it being said, that bees are 'clever'. Not 'clever' in the sense they can solve quadratic equations, conjugate Latin verbs or put Ikea furniture together without bits left over, but 'clever' in that they have developed effective and intricate methods of dealing with problems and organising and managing their community not least by the extraordinary Waggle Dance about which I did a blog here.

Previous experiments have shown that honeybees have some facility with numbers, because they were able to count landmarks as they were out foraging. But in these tests, the insects couldn't count very high — only to about four.

Researchers in Australia and France lured bees to a wall where they were presented with two square cards. Each card had a different number of black symbols, such as dots or triangles.
One group of bees  were trained to understand that sugar water would always be located under the card with the least number of symbols. "They could come and see two circles versus three circles, or four triangles versus one triangle, or something like that,"  according to Scarlett Howard head of the Australian research.
The bees quickly learned to fly to the card with the fewest symbols, an impressive feat.

But then they got another test: The researchers presented the bees with a card that had a single symbol — and a blank card that had nothing on it.
The bees seemed to understand that "zero" was less than one, because they flew toward the blank card more often than you'd expect if they were choosing at random — although they weren't that good at distinguishing between the two.

It got easier for them when they had to compare zero with a larger number. "When we showed them zero versus six, they did that at a much higher level than zero versus one," Howard says. "So what tells us is that they consider zero as an actual quantity along the number line. They're actually better at doing zero versus six because those two numbers are further apart."

The concept of zero is difficult to grasp and it appears bees possess a mathematical ability once thought to exist only in dolphins, primates, birds and humans who are beyond the preschool years.

Aren't they clever?