The secret life of bees
It appears that bees can be trained, and feel emotions such as happiness
It’s a warm, sunny day and bees are buzzing around the garden, visiting flower after flower, collecting pollen and nectar to sustain their community. This timeless scenario has become so much a part of our natural world that we take these humble insects at face value.
Bees are just bees, right? Mindless automatons, they slave away for the benefit of the hive, following an in-built program that has evolved over millions of years. But is this really all there is to these little creatures?
With a brain the size of a mustard seed, we have long assumed that bees, like other insects, do not have enough grey matter to indulge in reasoned thought or the nuanced behaviour we associate with birds, mammals and other animals with much larger and more complex brains.
This basic assumption has, however, recently been shaken up by a number of imaginative scientists, who are revealing aspects of bee behaviour that point to the startling conclusion that bees are, in fact, capable of learning new tasks, and can use tools, solve problems, improvise, and make individual decisions. There is even evidence to show that bees react in ways that seem suspiciously similar to human emotions.
how smart are they?
We’ve known for at least 300 years that bees are smart and live in an elaborate society, with guards, food collectors, temperature controllers, honeycomb builders, egg-laying queens and her consort drones. But when Austrian ethologist Karl von Frisch made his famous observations of dancing bees in the early 20th century, many scientists and philosophers were outraged by his suggestion that mere insects are able to communicate using a form of language.
The ‘waggle dance’ described by von Frisch is performed by a successful forager bee on returning to the hive, and communicates to other bees the distance and direction of a food source. The number of circuits in the figure-of-eight dance indicates the distance, while the orientation of the dance shows the direction. Not only are bees using
symbolic language to share information about the location of food sources, this dance also raises the tantalising possibility that bees may be able to count.
It seems that they can. In an experiment carried out in Germany in the 1990s, honey bees trained to expect food along a route after passing a certain number of identical landmarks were shown to be able to estimate the distance of the food by counting the number of landmarks.
It is also clear that bees are expert navigators able to remember the locations of a large number of flower patches. By using miniature tracking devices, scientists have recently discovered that, as they make repeated journeys, bees work out the shortest and straightest paths between food sources. Rather than mechanically repeating their actions, bees are constantly learning from their environment and innovating new solutions.
Such brain power has never been seen in an insect before, and although these experiments show that bees are capable of remarkable mental feats, most of the tasks involved could be considered fundamental to a bee’s natural foraging routines. To determine the extent of a bee’s deductive powers, Dr Olli Loukola and his colleagues at the Queen Mary University of London decided to take bumblebees out of their comfort zone, and devised a series of tests to see if they could be taught to use tools.
The use of tools shows that an animal is able to envision how a particular object can be used to achieve a goal. Tool use has always been held up as a sign of higher-order intelligence, and for a long time was ascribed to humans alone. But then it was seen in primates, followed by marine mammals, and later in birds.
In 2016, Dr Loukola’s team demonstrated that bumblebees could learn to pull strings to access a reward of sugary syrup. Not only was this quite extraordinary, but the technique soon spread around the colony. To see if bees could use other objects as tools, they trained them to move a small plastic ball into a hole, to be rewarded with a drop of syrup. The bees proved to be good at this, and also improved rapidly, devising new ways of getting a reward and learning the technique from other bees.
Do bees have feelings?
These revelations have astounded biologists, and further tests have raised the intriguing possibility that bumblebees may experience feelings that resemble our mental state of happiness.
We experience a sense of wellbeing when our brains produce a chemical called dopamine. This neurotransmitter makes us feel more optimistic, and we are more likely to be adventurous.
To determine whether bumblebees experience similar emotional states, the researchers gave one group of bees sugary water and another group plain water before setting them free to forage.
The result was that the bees given the sugar were more likely to look for sources of food in new and ambiguous situations than their sugarless peers. The sugar reward was also shown to give the bees a hit of dopamine. This chemical makes humans feel good, and maybe it affects bees in the same way, making them feel more optimistic and adventurous.
As you can imagine, this is a very controversial idea. Without asking bees to fill out a questionnaire, we can’t know whether they feel positive emotions, but we do know that even an insect with such a tiny brain is far more capable of learning, innovating and communicating than we ever thought possible. Now that’s worth making a buzz about!