A bumblebee outfitted with a tiny tracking device Joe Woodgate/PA
Bumblebees aren’t just hard workers, they’re efficient, too. These insects have a grasp of maths that enables them to crack the classic travelling salesman problem as they forage for pollen and nectar.
The problem, a benchmark of computer science, poses the question, “Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city and returns to the origin city?”
This was the conundrum facing bumblebees let loose on an …
