They've been revered by the ancient Egyptians, praised by Shakespeare, and feared by Winnie-the-Pooh, among others. You might be surprised to learn how much bees know.
The professor of sensory and behavioural ecology at Queen Mary University of London says there is evidence that bees have emotion-like states.
Chittka is considered to be one of the world's leading experts on bee sensory systems and cognitive.
In his latest book, The Mind of a Bee, he argues that bees need our protection because they may be sentient beings and that humans have an ethical obligation to ensure their survival.
The work done by our lab has shown that bees are very smart. They can count, recognise images of human faces and learn basic tool use.
He believes bees have emotions, can plan and imagine, and can differentiate themselves from other bees. Female worker bees were used in some of the experiments. She gets a sugar reward when she gets something right. They are trained to recognize human faces. The bees were shown pictures of human faces and learned that one of them was associated with a sugar reward. We give them a choice of faces and then ask them which one they want. They are able to find the correct one out of many faces.
He said it took them only a dozen to two dozen training sessions to becomeficient face recognizers.
The bees were trained to fly past landmarks to a food source. We either increased or decreased the number of landmarks after they flew there. The bees tend to land earlier when landmarks are closer together. They used a lot of landmarks to say that this is a good place to land.
Since the landmarks were the same, he was sure the bees wouldn't identify a particular one. Counting the number of landmarks is the only way to solve the problem.
The bees were able to imagine how things would look and feel, for example, they could identify a sphere visually which they had only felt in the dark. They could understand the difference between the two concepts.
Some bees were more curious and confident than others, he realized. The odd genius bee that does something better than all the other bees in a colony is what you find.
You find the odd ‘genius bee’ that does something better than all the other individuals of a colony.
Once you train a single individual in the colony, the skill spreads quickly to all the bees.
When Chittka trained a demonstrator bee to do a task in a sub-optimal way, the Observer bee would improve her technique to solve the task more efficiently.
There is a form of thought inside the bee's head and this shows that a bee has intentionality or an awareness of what the desired outcome of her actions is. It is an internal modelling of how will I get to the desired outcome.
He was starting to wonder if intelligent creatures had feelings. bees were attacked by a crab spider when they landed on a flower Their entire demeanor changed afterwards. They became very hesitant to land on flowers and inspected them thoroughly before making a decision.
After being attacked, bees behaved as if they were seeing ghosts. They looked at the flower and rejected it even if they didn't see a spider.
They behaved like they had a mental health problem. They showed the strange psychological effects of rejecting perfectly good flowers. They flew away after they inspected the flowers. This indicated to us that there was a negative emotion.
The experiment was flipped and the bees were given a treat instead of a flower, to see if they would check it out. They would accept the ambiguous stimuli with less hesitation, because of the reward.
At the London School of Economics, Dr Jonathan Birch leads a project on animal sentience. In the past, academics have not asked these questions about insects. They are beginning to.
It is likely that bees don't feel any emotions at all because of their advanced cognitive skills. He saysience is about being able to have feelings. There are some indications that bees have emotion-like states.
Chittka believes that bees are sentient beings. We are exposing them to challenges they have never faced before. They are resolving them.
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