Bee Intelligence and Emotion

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Worker bees of a colony working on a honeycomb, displaying social division of labor

The concept of the hive mind has long fascinated the scientific community and captured the imagination of sci-fi authors, with hymenoptran sociality reaching as far as spacefaring hyperintelligence such as in Orson Scott Card’s fictional work Ender’s Game in which ant-like Formics threaten the human race. Eusociality has been widely observed in hymenoptera such as ants, wasps, and bees, in which colonies have distinct caste differences between reproductive and nonreproductive members of the brood. It has long been a wonder as to how seemingly “simple bugs” can display such a wide range of “intelligent” behaviors. Consequently, the big question that’s left scientists scratching their heads is: how far does their intelligence reach? Researchers have closely studied bees, insects of the clade Anthophila, to elucidate this important biophilosphical question, especially in light of the recent “plight of the bumblebee” that has unfortunately taken a hefty toll on the fuzzy, buzzy, and busy bees whom we rely so heavily upon for agriculture around the world.

In just the past month, entomologists made two wonderful discoveries that each shed some more light on the puzzling question of bee intelligence. Bee-lovers from the University of Queen Mary London uncovered a behavior nothing short of adorable in our diminutive insect allies. According to their observations, after bumblebees drink a small droplet of sugary water, they appear to behave in a positive “emotion-like state.” Bees trained to search for food in certain colors of flowers were divided into two groups, one that was fed the sugar water and another that was not. The scientists found that bees fed the sugar water took less time to land on ambiguously-colored flowers beyond just general arousal–they seemed to be in a positive state. The published findings from Science revealed for the first time that insects have states match with criteria of emotions, which is especially significant, as bees  possess relatively simple nervous systems. This opens a number of doors for the investigation of emotion in the animal kingdom and will help develop our understanding of our own human emotion within its evolutionary context. We often ascribe emotions to “higher-order animals” who possess greater intelligence; beyond pushing the boundary of what was originally thought to be the limits of insect intelligence, this discovery ultimately forces us to redefine our notions of what constitutes emotions or intelligence at large.

 

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Bumblebees from UQML’s behavioral study display object manipulation and social learning

As if this wasn’t toppling enough, researchers from the same British university (UQML) came out with a study a little over a week later showing that bees can learn to pull strings! Not only do these curious creatures find unique avenues for obtaining food through object manipulation, but can also learn from one another in a fashion suggestive of culture. The findings from PLOS Biology illustrated that naive bees were able to socially learn the task by observing a demonstrator bee and later successfully perform the same task. This groundbreaking finding further pushed the envelope of our understanding of bee intelligence. To quote the author of the study, “cultural transmission does not require the high cognitive sophistication specific to humans, nor is it a distinctive feature of humans.”

 

These two findings add to a growing list of what we know about bee behaviors, which range from dancing rituals to remarkable displays of visual working memory in decision making. It seems that the more we learn about the world around us, the more we learn how intelligent our animal relatives truly are, no matter how distantly related, and begin to doubt whether we really are special creatures in this ceaselessly amazing biological world we live in.
Sources:
  • C. J. Perry, L. Baciadonna, L. Chittka. Unexpected rewards induce dopamine-dependent positive emotion-like state changes in bumblebees. Science, 2016; 353 (6307): 1529 DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf4454
  • Michelsen, A.; Anderson, B. B.; Kirchner, W. H.; Lindauer, M. (1989). “Honeybees can be recruited by a mechanical model of a dancing bee”.Naturwissenschaften. 76: 277–280.
  • Sylvain Alem, Clint J. Perry, Xingfu Zhu, Olli J. Loukola, Thomas Ingraham, Eirik Søvik, Lars Chittka. Associative Mechanisms Allow for Social Learning and Cultural Transmission of String Pulling in an Insect. PLOS Biology, 2016; 14 (10): e1002564 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002564
  • Zhang, S; Bock F; Si A; Tautz J; Srinivasan MV (April 5, 2005). “Visual working memory in decision making by honey bees”.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.102 (14): 5250–5.

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