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Honeybees are able to do basic maths like adding and subtracting, that's according to scientists in Australia.

This new study, led by researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne, shows that bees can be taught to recognise colours that represent addition and subtraction, and they can use this information to solve maths problems.

Researchers say that solving maths problems involves being able to manage numbers, and to use you long-term and short-term memory.

Professor Adrian Dyer said: "You need to be able to hold the rules around adding and subtracting in your long-term memory", while working things out with specific numbers in your short-term memory.

He think that more non-human animals continued: "Our findings suggest that advanced numerical cognition may be found much more widely in nature among non-human animals than previously suspected."

The study hopes to get a better understanding of the relationship between brain size and brain power.

But how did they do it?

Scientists trained honeybees to visit a Y-shaped maze.

The bees got a reward of sugary water when they made a correct choice in the maze, and got a bitter-tasting solution if the choice was incorrect.

When a bee flew into the entrance of the maze they would see 1 to 5 shapes. The shapes were either blue, which meant the bee had to add, or yellow, which meant the bee had to subtract.

The bee would then fly to another room where it could choose to fly to the left or right side of the maze.

One side had an incorrect solution to the problem and the other side had the correct solution. The correct answer was changed randomly throughout the experiment to avoid bees learning to visit just one side of the maze.

According to researchers at the beginning of the experiment, bees made random choices until they could work out how to solve the problem.

They eventually learned that blue meant +1, while yellow meant -1. The bees could then apply the rules to new numbers.