Beyond busy pollinators: bees buzz with brilliance

We all know these busy insects are good for crops and biodiversity, but proof is emerging that they are also clever, sentient and unique beings. Donna Ferguson reports.

THEY have been revered by the ancient Egyptians, lauded by Shakespeare, feared by WinniethePooh and, most recently, battled by

Rowan Atkinson in the new Netflix hit Man vs. Bee.

But love or loathe them, you may be surprised to discover just how much bees know.

‘‘We now have suggestive evidence that there is some level of conscious awareness in bees — that there is a sentience, that they have emotionlike states,’’ Lars Chittka, professor of sensory and behavioural ecology at Queen Mary University of London, said.

Chittka had been studying bees for 30 years and was considered one of the world’s leading experts on bee sensory systems and cognition.

In his latest book, The Mind of a Bee, he argues that bees need our protection, not just because they are useful for crop pollination and biodiversity, but because they may be sentient beings — and humans have an ethical obligation to ensure their survival.

‘‘Our work and that of other labs has shown that bees are really highly intelligent individuals — that they can count, recognise images of human faces and learn simple tool use and abstract concepts.’’

He believed bees had emotions, could plan and imagine things, and could recognise themselves as unique entities distinct from other bees.

He drew these conclusions from experiments in his lab with female worker bees.

‘‘Whenever a bee gets something right, she gets a sugar reward.

‘‘That’s how we train them, for example, to recognise human faces.’’

It took them only a dozen to two dozen training sessions to become ‘‘proficient face recognisers,’’ he said.

In the counting experiment, the bees were trained to fly past three identical landmarks to a food source.

‘‘After they had reliably flown there, we either increased the number of landmarks over the same distance or decreased it.’’

When landmarks were spaced closer together, the bees tended to land earlier than before and viceversa when the landmarks were placed further apart. Since the landmarks were identical, he could be sure the bees were not identifying a particular one when deciding how far to fly.

‘‘They really could get the solution only by counting the number of landmarks.’’

The bees were also capable of imagining how things would look or feel — for example, they could identify a sphere visually which previously they had only felt in the dark.

And they could understand abstract concepts such as ‘‘same’’ or ‘‘different’.

He began to realise some individual bees were more curious and confident than others.

‘‘You also find the odd

‘genius bee’ that does something better than all the other individuals of a colony, or indeed all the other bees we’ve tested.’’ — Guardian News and Media