BEES ARE CLEVER AND SENTIENT (?!)

Reproduced from: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/16/bees-are-really-highly-intelligent-the-insect-iq-tests-causing-a-buzz-among-scientists?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

They have been revered by the ancient Egyptians, lauded by Shakespeare, feared by Winnie-the-Pooh 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 emotion-like states,” says Lars Chittka, professor of sensory and behavioural ecology at Queen Mary University of London. Chittka has been studying bees for 30 years and is considered one of the world’s leading experts on bee sensory systems and cognition. In his latest book, The Mind of a Bee, published on 19 July, 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 thinks bees have emotions, can plan and imagine things, and can recognise themselves as unique entities distinct from other bees. He draws 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.” In this experiment, bees shown several monochrome images of human faces learn that one is associated with a sugar reward. “Then, we give them a choice of different faces and no rewards, and ask: which do you choose now? And indeed, they can find the correct one out of an array of different faces.” It takes 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 vice versa when the landmarks were placed further apart. “So they were using the number of landmarks to say: ah ha, I’ve flown far enough, this is a good place to land.” Since the landmarks were identical, he could be sure the bees weren’t identifying a particular one when deciding how far to fly. “They really could get the solution only by counting the number of landmarks.”