Ants, fruit flies, and even plants can also calculate but it does not follow that they are conscious of what they are doing:
Our results showed the miniature brains of honeybees were able to understand the concepts of odd and even. So a large and complex human brain consisting of 86 billion neurons, and a miniature insect brain with about 960,000 neurons, could both categorize numbers by parity.
Scarlett Howard, Adrian Dyer, Andrew Greentree and Jair Garcia, “Honeybees join humans as the only known animals that can tell the difference between odd and even numbers” at Phys.org (April 29, 2022) The paper is open access.
That should, of course, be a hint that it’s not the same process.
Bees would be useful for this sort of research because, as the researchers point out, “Studies have shown honeybees can learn to order quantities, perform simple addition and subtraction, match symbols with quantities and relate size and number concepts.”
Nature is founded on mathematics and it is hardly surprising that some life forms take advantage of that. In other examples…
News, “Claim: Honeybees, “like humans” can tell odd vs. even numbers” at Mind Matters News
Takehome: Bees are not six-legged humans. They are incorporating the mathematical structure of the universe into their survival strategies. The researchers mainly demonstrated that we can use operant conditioning on bees.
You may also wish to read: Pigeons can solve the Monty Hall problem. But can you? The dilemma pits human folk intuition against actual probability theory, with surprising results. In one 2010 study, pigeons outperformed humans in the three-doors test but in a second 2012 study, they only beat preschoolers, not college kids.