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The Mind of the Honey Bee
Intelligence Isn’t Strictly a Human Characteristic
By: Ross Conrad
Vertebrates are considered to be group of organisms that are among the most advanced beings on earth. Mammals which generally have larger brains compared to other vertebrates are thought to possess the most advanced cognitive abilities and, are considered the highest of the invertebrate class. Intelligence, language and problem solving is terrain once reserved exclusively for humans. The fact that we ourselves are mammals, probably introduces some bias into such evaluations since we like to portray ourselves as the most intelligent beings on the planet. While they appear to be much different from us, honey bees with their tiny brains are very clever and much more like human beings that most of us would care to admit.
Just like all mammals, honey bees have a low rate of reproduction, they allow their offspring to develop in a controlled and protective womb-like environment (brood cells), the females produce a milky substance from special glands in their bodies to feed their young (royal jelly), the super-organism maintains an elevated body temperature in the brood nest of around 94-95°F (not wildly different from our normal body temperature of 98.6°F) and have hair that like most mammals, more or less covers their body. In addition, like us, honey bees have a complex social structure, produce their own food, construct their own shielded living space and exert significant control over the internal environment within their homes.
Bee intelligence
Honey bees, despite the tiny size of their brain, possess highly developed cognitive abilities related to memory and learning that appears superior to even some vertebrates. The cognitive power of living organisms can be divided up into a number of escalating categories: “Sensing” which is not so different from a simple stimulus response; “behavior” suggesting the possibility of choice or a conditioned response such as associating a specific scent with a food reward; “intelligence” which takes us into the world of problem-solving and reason; while “consciousness” is the awareness of the self and others, and includes the ability to have feelings, which is the definition of sentience. Sentience has been described as a minimalistic way of defining consciousness. Besides feelings, consciousness includes creativity, self-awareness and intentionality (the ability to have thoughts about something). Consciousness is a threshold that historically has been reserved for humans, but modern science is challenging this idea.
Early on it was suggested that honey bees were near the bottom of the insect intelligence pyramid. Maurice Maeterlinck wrote: “Sir John Lubbock is very much inclined to deny bees all powers of discrimination and all deliberation… As proof he provides an experiment that anyone can easily repeat. Put half a dozen flies and the same number of bees in a water bottle, lie the bottle down horizontally and turn it so that the bottom of the bottle faces the window of the room. The bees will struggle for hours to find a way out through the glass bottom before they finally die of exhaustion and hunger, whilst the flies have escaped to the opposite side through the neck of the bottle in less than two minutes. Sir John Lubbock concludes that the bee’s brain is extremely limited and that the fly is much better equipped to solve this dilemma and find the way out… What lets the bees down in the experiment of this English scholar is their love of light and their intellect itself. They evidently surmise that the escape route from every prison is on the light side; so the bee is acting logically, only too logically” (Maeterlinck, 1901).
Nobel Prize winner, Karl von Frisch reflected the prevailing wisdom on honey bee intelligence when he suggests that how they behave is essentially something they are born with. “Innate behavior, ‘instincts,’ guide them on their way through life. Tried and tested over thousands of years, inherited through countless generations, instincts only fail when suddenly faced with unfamiliar tasks. They do not need a lot of brain matter because they restrict themselves to just a few tasks. They are designed for the normal case…” (Menzel, 2021).
Advanced concepts and communications
The complex behavior of the honey bee is on full display when we consider the forager seeking food. The forager not only recognizes flowers, but is able to distinguish and discriminate between different types of flowers as evidenced by her fidelity to a specific species of blossoming plant during each foraging trip.
Foraging bees must also learn how to manipulate a wide variety of flowers and navigate their different structures to access nectar and pollen. Research into this ability was first conducted in the 1950s and looked at the foraging behavior of bees on alfalfa blossoms (Reinhardt, 1952). The alfalfa blossom has evolved a flower structure whose the sexual parts are held under pressure. When touched the pressure is released and the pressurized parts pop out, catching the bee in the head and releasing a small cloud of pollen in the air. This appears to bother honey bees since unlike solitary bees, honey bees quickly learn to access the flower’s nectar while avoiding the exploding mechanism of the blossom.
Native pollinators are actually better pollinators of alfalfa crops since they don’t learn to avoid getting hit by the pressurized parts of the alfalfa blossom like honey bees do.
To improve their foraging performance, bees are able to evaluate the likelihood of a flower containing nectar from the chemical messages that a previous forager left behind to signal that the flower is “empty”. The time it takes for the chemical signal to fade is about as fast as it takes for the flower to refill itself with nectar. By approaching a flower and getting the message before landing, bees more efficiently devote their time to the most productive blossoms.
Bees then must determine and remember the geographic location of the flower in the landscape with respect to their hive. Most beekeepers have heard of the forager’s ability to communicate a rough sense of direction, distance and desirability level of a food source to her sisters through a dance language. Though intelligent behavior, the waggle dance is not technically a language in the strict sense because it lacks the numerous symbols required for a large number of combinatorial patterns. It lacks grammar, and the learning component fails to include a symbolic code, but it is impressively intelligent behavior nonetheless.
Bees also learn to increase the efficiency of their time and energy output while foraging. Researchers studying bee foraging behavior using experimental feeders find that round trip flight times between the feeder and hive diminish over time until a stable minimum time is achieved. This provides evidence that bees recognize and learn to take the most direct path to a food source. In addition, bees will tend to prioritize the richest food sources that offer the highest sugar concentration adding to the efficiency of each foraging trip.
Spelling bee or math bee?
Bees are able to distinguish differences in colors and odors (Menzel, et al, 1973; Tait et al., 2019). Bees also learn and remember shapes which is the first step on the path to being able to read a written language. However, bees are much better at math than they are at english.
Studies have shown that honey bees can apparently count and discriminate up to four objects (Chittka et al., 1995; Dacke & Srinivasan, 2008; Gross et al. 2009: Skorupski et al., 2017), while other research suggest that honey bees seem to also understand the concept of zero and are correctly able to identify the smaller of two groups of objects with 65-70 percent accuracy. Not a high grade by human standards but certainly a passing grade. To quote the paper, “Our findings show that honey bees can learn and apply the concepts of greater than and less than to interpret a blank stimulus as representing the conceptual number of zero and place zero in relation to other numerical values. Bees thus perform at a level consistent with that of nonhuman primates by understanding that zero is lower than one” (Howard et al., 2018).
Honey bees also display the ability to add and subtract. A plus or minus sign is too abstract for a honey bee so scientists used colors and shapes which bees are able to learn very quickly. Researchers released bees into a maze that exposed them to a picture of a number of colored shapes. They then flew through a hole where there were two additional images with a different number of shapes. Researchers prompted the bees into deciding whether to add by making the all the shapes blue when the feeder with a sugar syrup reward was associated with the image that contained one more shape than the original image. All the shapes were yellow when the sweet reward was associated with the image with one fewer shape and subtraction was called for (Howard et al., 2018). Remarkably the bees tested were able to add and subtract correctly most of the time.
Bee on time
Numerous studies have also found that bees have an uncanny sense of time. When artificial feeding stations are set up to provide sugar syrup at a specific and limited time of day, within a day or two, bees will adjust themselves to the feeding schedule. Honey bees have been trained to arrive at feeding places up to five specific times of day and have even learned to appear at four diverse feeding locations at four different times of day (von Frisch, 1967).
Plants have learned to compete for pollinator attention by only producing nectar at certain times of day, a quality that honey bees remember and quickly learn to exploit. Buckwheat for example only produced nectar in the morning and will be humming with activity, but no bee or other pollinator will be seen visiting buckwheat in the afternoon.
Never before encountered situations
An example of the extraordinary ability of honey bee to learn and adapt can be found in the log books of the space shuttle where during space flight, the honey bees seemed to exhibit a remarkable ability to learn and adapt to the zero-gravity conditions in space, a situation where the bees were given no previous exposure or training. Space shuttle crew initial observations indicated that, “Bees were observed to engage in short flights” and that “…some bees collided with the walls of the chamber.” But just four days later, bees engaging in flights avoided such collisions. The crew noted in the log book that “…bees seemed to adapt to 0-g pretty well. No longer trying to fly against top of box. Many actually fly from place to place” (Poskevich, 1989).
Performance enhancements
About a hundred years ago, the founder of biodynamics, Rudolf Steiner, was apparently onto something when he recommended beekeepers replace some of the water used to mix up sugar syrup for feed with tea made from the herbs chamomile or thyme. Apparently, both caffeine and tea polyphenols significantly improve honey bee memory retention (Gong et al., 2021). However, the high-test teas may have an edge over the non-caffeinated herbal types, since caffeine, but not tea polyphenols, seems to slightly increased honey bee learning.
Are bees sentient beings?
In his book, The Mind of the Bee, author Lars Chittka makes the case that bees employ a level of conscious awareness and emotion-like states. As evidence, he sites one experiment where bees that landed on a flower experienced a simulated crab spider attack which caused them to become highly suspicious and hesitant to land on subsequent flowers. This anxious behavior would last for days and even resulted in PTSD-type behavior where the bees would reject perfectly good flowers with no predation threat. On the flip side, when bees received a treat before checking out a flower they had been trained to perceive may not be worth landing on, the reward appeared to put the bees in a good mood where they would accept ambiguous flowers with less hesitation. The evidence of emotion-like states along with the sophisticated cognitive abilities of honey bees suggests these are sentient beings. When you stop think about it, this is all quite astonishing and deserves consideration as we beekeepers approach and manage the colonies in our care.
Ross Conrad is a beekeeper living in Middlebury, Vermont. Ross endeavors to manage his bees in as an environmentally sustainable way as possible and works to share natural/organic beekeeping techniques with others through his writings, workshops, mentoring, and classes.
In ancient times sacred symbols were often painted by the entrances of bee hives. Today, beekeepers often paint hives a variety of colors in order to help bees recognize their hive among others in an apiary and reduce forager drifting between hives.
References:
Chittka, L., Geiger, K. (1995) Can honey bees count landmarks? Anim. Behav. 49, 159–164
Dacke, M., Srinivasan, M.V. (2008) Evidence for counting in insects. Anim. Cogn. 11, 683–689
Gong, Z., Gu, G., Wang, Y., Dong, S., Tan, K., Nieh, J.C. (2021) Floral tea polyphenols can improve honey bee memory retention and olfactory sensitivity, Journal of Insect Physiology, 128:
Gross, H.J., Pahl, M., Si, A., Zhu, H., Tautz, J., Zhang, S (2009) Number-based visual generalisation in the honeybee. PLOS ONE 4, e4263
Howard, S.R., Avarguès-Weber, A., Garcia, J.E., Greentree, A.D., Dyer, A.G. (2018) Numerical ordering of zero in honey bees, Science, 360 (6393) 1124-1126
Maeterlinck M. (1901) The life of the bee. Dodd, Mead. pg. 85
Menzel, R., Erber, J., Masuhr, T. (1973) Learning and memory in the honey bee, Experimental analysis of insect behavior by L. B. Browne, New York, Springer-Verlag, pp. 195-217
Poskevich D., (1989) A comparison of honeycomb structures built by Apis mellifera (SE82_17). In: Jackson JT, Christie NW, comps. Shuttle Student Involvement Program (SSIP) Final Reports of Experiments Flown. Houston TX: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center; JSC 24005.
Reinhardt, J. F. (1952) Some responses of honey bees to alfalfa flowers, The American naturalist 86:257-275
Skorupski, P., MaBouDi, H., Galpayage Dona, H.S., Chittka, L. (2017) Counting insects. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci. 373
Tait, C., Mattise-Lorenzen, A., Lark, A., Nuag, D (2019) Interindividual variation in learning ability in honeybees, Behavioural processes
Von Frisch, Karl (1967) The dance language & orientation of bees, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA pg. 254
