Ok, I'll ask - is a bird or a honey bee more intelligent?

Before you answer, let me just say a few things...

Pound-for-pound honey bees are indeed impressive. I actually didn't know all of those things, so thank you for sharing. Since I am no bee expert, I can only offer general principles. But yeah, that's a lot of fancy behaviors crammed into just ~1 million neurons; great optimization. However, with so few neurons, and so many programmed tasks, it leaves very little room for flexibility in their behavioral responses, which are likely to be exceptionally dependent on environment stability (see #1). I assume most people would include behavioral flexibility in their working-definition of intelligence. So it would make sense to consider not just the total number of behaviors an animal can perform, but also the degree of cognitive plasticity baked-in to the system overall.

Birds also display an exceptional repertoire of behavior, despite their bird-brain (#2). Youtube has endless examples of birds doing incredible and hilarious things beyond flying and singing. For example I remember watching a few vids on Bowerbirds not too long ago, which build incredibly elaborate domiciles in an attempt to impress their lady friends; the ones making nests near urban areas were incorporating a lot of colorful man-made trinkets they scavenged from the big city to woo the ladies (which I think suggests some level of flexibility). Crows are even more impressive. These birds are so smart they get bored; and when they do, sometimes they like to fuck with other animals for entertainment (or so it seems). Also this: #3. I think chickens could potentially display similar highly adaptable behaviors; but they are written-off as nitwits because you often find them as the product of being stuffed into a cage for 18 hours a day, and all basic needs taken care of by humans. I hold the same prejudice to the rats in my lab (good for nothing idiot rats, can't learn jack, so lazy); until I see a rat in the wild and it's all athletic and reading books and stuff.

All that said, I actually agree with your sentiment - that you cannot assume certain species are more or less intelligent than others, simply based on the relative sizes of their brain. However, if you take humans as the gold-standard for a highly intelligent species on Earth, and someone starts talking smack about our cousin being dumber than a honey bee, I'm going to take some liberties to make some sweeping generalizations of my own... but yeah, thanks for reeling me in on this. Apologies to the honey bee.

#1. This is highly speculative, but behavioral inflexibility might be a contributing reason to the unprecedented rate of Colony Collapse Disorder we are seeing in western honey bees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder.

#2."Birds are remarkably intelligent, although their brains are small. Corvids and some parrots are capable of cognitive feats comparable to those of great apes. Olkowicz, et al. (2016) "Birds have primate-like numbers of neurons in the forebrain". https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4932926/

#3. Parrot singing Drowning Pool song https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uguXNL93fWg