Be the bee

Bees can count to four and understand the concept of zero. But they can also do another neat trick : they can perceive an object using one sense and they recognise it using another

In the light, but barred from touching the objects, bumblebees were trained to find rewarding sugar water in one type of object (cubes or spheres) and bitter quinine solution in the other shape. When tested in the dark, bees preferred the object that was previously rewarding, spending more time exploring them. Bumblebees also solved the task the other way around. After bees learned to find a particular shape in the dark, they were tested in the light and again preferred the shape they had learned was rewarding by touch alone.

Dr. Solvi cautions: "This doesn't mean bees experience the world the same way we do, but it does show there is more going on in their heads than we have ever given them credit for."

Fair enough. But, just as it seems unlikely a small fuzzy flying furball with compound eyes would experience the world in quite the same way as a relatively hairless bespectacled astronomer, so it seems that they may not be so different either. As octopus experience the same sort of optical illusions that fool humans, so bees demonstrate a fundamental similarity : they possess, at some level, mental representations of the world. Are they conscious of it, however dimly, even if only in a barely-coherent dreamlike state ? Do they imagine translating tactile sensory input into mental images ? We don't know, and likely can't know. But the simpler statement that they do experience the world seems safer.

Bumblebees can experience an object using one sense and later recognize it using another

How are we able to find things in the dark? And how can we imagine how something feels just by looking at it? It is because our brain is able to store information in such a way that it can be retrieved by different senses.