The Mind of a Bee with Dr. Lars Chittka (S6, E06)

S6, E06 - The Mind of a Bee with Dr. Lars Chittka (S6, E06)

Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment presented by Betterbee. I'm Jeff Ott.

Kim Flottum: I'm Kim Flottum.

Global Patties: Hey, Jeff and Kim. Today's sponsor is Global Patties. They're a family-operated business that manufactures protein supplement patties for honeybees. It's a good time to think about honeybee nutrition. Feeding your hives protein supplement patties will ensure that they produce strong and healthy colonies by increasing brood production and overall honey flow. Now is a great time to consider what type of patty is right for your area and your honey bees. Global offers a variety of standard patties as well as custom patties to meet your needs.

No matter where you are, Global is ready to serve you out of their manufacturing plants in Airdrie, Alberta, and in Butte, Montana or from distribution depots across the continent. Visit them today at www.globalpatties.com.

Jeff: Thank you, Sherry. A quick shout out to all of our sponsors who support and allows us to bring you this podcast each week without resorting to a fee-based subscription. We don't want that and we know you don't either. Be sure to check out all of our content on our website. There you can read up on our guest, read our blog on the various aspects and observations about beekeeping, search for, download, and listen to over 200 past episodes. Read episode transcripts, leave comments and feedback on each show, and check on podcast specials from our sponsors. You can find it all at www.beekeepingtodaypodcast.com.

Hey everyone, thanks again for joining us today. We know you have demands on your time and appreciate your spending the next 50 minutes or so with us. Hey, we could use your help opening the show. Simply record yourself or your beekeeping group introducing yourselves, where you keep bees, and welcoming other listeners to the Beekeeping Today Podcast. You can record yourself on your mobile device or anything you want to record yourself on and send it to us. See, it's that easy. On today's show, we talk with Lars Chittka on his recent book, The Mind of a Bee. How do bees experience the world in which they live and work?

How do their brains work? How do their eyes work? How does it all come together and make this little creature interact with its world? Do bees think? Do they feel pain? Are they conscious? Lars talks to us about these intriguing questions and you will want to stay tuned and hear what he has to say. First sitting at the Beekeeping Today podcast table, I want to welcome back Becky Masterman from the Minnesota Honey Producers. Becky's been on the podcast several times in the past.

Today, she's here to talk to us about the important USDA, ARS NP305 stakeholder comment period that ends in October 7th. You're sitting there saying, "Jeff, what is NP305 stakeholder comment period?" Becky, welcome to the show. Please tell us the importance of this comment period and the NP305.

Becky Masterman: Thank you, Jeff. I just learned about it myself, so you're going to hear about everything that I just learned. Actually, the stakeholder comment period ends August 7th, which is minutes away practically. We are very, very excited to learn that the USDA, Agricultural Research Services or ARS is asking beekeepers who have an interest in bee health and obviously challenges in their operations to share three very important things with them. If it's okay with you, I'm going to read the three questions that they're asking us. Does that sound okay?

Jeff: Sounds good.

Becky: The national program, that's what NP stands for, NP305 it falls under crop protection, and under crop protection, falls bees and pollination. That's where the beekeepers are. The first question that they're asking us to talk about is, what are the most important problems and challenges your organization or farm operation faces for which research from NP305 crop protection could contribute solutions? There are two more questions. Are you ready?

Jeff: Yes, I'm writing them down.

Becky: Okay. [laughter] Taking notes. The second question, what are the top research priorities that NP305 should focus on during the next five years? Third question, how can ARS, which is the Agricultural Research Services, partner with stakeholders to conduct NP305 research? Jeff, those are some really big questions and we don't have a lot of time to answer them.

Jeff: They're operating on a 305 that was done previously in 2018, I think, right, 2018?

Becky: Yes. That's another reason why this is so critical is that this is a five-year plan. I feel like we have three minutes to plan what we'd like them to do or to give them input on what we think that they should be doing to help us in the next five years. Honestly, Jeff, I think we need to maybe cheat from each other. The Minnesota Honey Producers, what we're going to do is we're going to prepare our answers to these three very important questions.

We're going to put them on our website and anybody who wants to copy them or take our answers and then modify them to maybe meet their needs, that's what we're going to hope that they do because even if they're not asking for the same requests that we are asking for if we can give them a start, that's always maybe easier to help them.

Jeff: Yes, absolutely. I want to restate what you said because they're going to take the comments from beekeepers that is submitted on their website before August 7th and formulate their five-year plan for research on honeybees and pollination for the next five years.

Becky: Exactly.

Jeff: That's pretty critical. How long has this been out? This sounds pretty important. It sounds like the industry should be behind it. Are they?

Becky: The interesting part about this is that this message came to the Minnesota Honey Producers on July 17th, and you and I are talking four days later. I hope that didn't take the mystery out of it for your audience.

[laughter]

Jeff: No, it's Friday July 21st, and it's my son's birthday. Happy birthday, Ethan. This was going to be released on Monday on the 24th.

Becky: Oh, that's fantastic. Don't ask me to sing now because I can't. We just heard about this, and so I immediately went to people because I was interested to see what organizations submitted previously or what's the general consensus. I have yet to find anybody who actually has ever heard of this stakeholder comment period for the USDA, ARS. It was five years ago what they say. I've talked to a lot of people who've had many opportunities to comment on the USDA, ARS program and nobody remembers the stakeholder opportunity.

I do think though, even though we have a short period of time to give our input, it's so important that we do. There are so many critical things that we need to share with them that we can get help on.

Jeff: Oh, absolutely. The ARS and the scientists there at the lab do fantastic research. Even this morning, I was reading about a new bee virus that was discovered through ARS research and that that may be a causative agent to the disappearance, or I shouldn't say disappearance, but the struggles our bees have during the winter. This is research that they're doing. Here they are looking for our help or input to help provide some guidance or direction what we as beekeepers and honey producers and pollinators.

What are the important things affecting us? They're asking the people who are actually out in the field who either enjoy it as a hobby or depend on it in part or in whole on their livelihoods, "What should we be researching? What's important?" and no one knows about this.

Becky: Correct, nobody knows about this, so thank goodness Beekeeping Today is going to help get the word out. We're very excited about that. I think that's interesting because we thought about some things that we've talked about with the Minnesota Honey Producers, but we could obviously benefit from a bigger conversation. What's on the top of our minds, we really would like a better seed mix that the USDA is actually using in their conservation programs because a couple of different studies have come out saying this food could be better for honeybees.

It was the pollinator mix CP42 was meant for honeybees and now we know it could be made better. We would love for that to be a priority in their next five years. We're really worried about triple A labs and we want to make sure we get as much support there as possible. We assume that's on their minds, but we want to make sure that we put that out there. Then something interesting came up. We just had our tristate meeting in Fargo with Minnesota, North, and South Dakota beekeepers. Dr. Judy Wu-Smart talked at that meeting and she put up a map of the ARS research that was being done.

It turns out that in the Midwest where so many of the beekeepers and the bees go in the summer and where they come to rest and get nutrition, it turns out we don't have any ARS support in our location. She's in Nebraska and she's actually had some problems sending samples for analysis to the ARS Labs because they've died in route because of the timing. She put up a really clear argument why beekeepers and the US beekeeping supply could really benefit from having a diagnostic presence in the Midwest. A couple of things off the top of our heads.

Jeff: That's fantastic, and we encourage Beekeeping Today Podcast and Minnesota Honey Producers Association and all interested beekeepers should check out the NP305, the USDA, ARS website. I'll put those links to these questions in the show notes so folks can look at that either on our website or on your app here if you're listening on a phone and go to the Minnesota Honey Producers website to look at the questions that they're posing.

Becky: We're going to post it under "news".

Jeff: Under "news".

Becky: As soon as we do our homework, we're going to let everybody cheat off of it. [laughs]

Jeff: That's not cheating, it's sharing-

Becky: It's not cheating.

Jeff: -of information.

Becky: Exactly.

Jeff: I also have the link to the Minnesota Honey Producers Association website in our show notes as well. Look for it under the news heading. Becky, just a little tease to our listeners, you and John Miller will be with us in a couple of weeks talking more about some of these programs, but this NP305 was such unknown and that comment period closes before the episode will be out. We wanted to get you on today to discuss this real quickly. I appreciate you taking the time today to talk about it and letting listeners know.

Becky: We greatly appreciate the opportunity to spread the word because we have over a hundred thousand beekeepers in the United States, and everybody's voice is so important when it comes to bee health, so thank you, Jeff.

Jeff: Thank you, Becky.

[music]

StrongMicrobials: Hey, beekeepers. Many times during the year, honeybees encounter a scarcity of floral sources. As good beekeepers, we feed our bees artificial diets of protein and carbohydrates to keep them going during those stressful times. What is missing though are key components, the good microbes necessary for a bee to digest the food and convert it into metabolic energy. Only SuperDFM Honeybee by Strong Microbials can provide the necessary microbes to optimally convert the artificial diet into energy necessary for improving longevity, reproduction, immunity, and much more.

SuperDFM Honeybee is an all-natural probiotic supplement for your honeybees. Find it at strongmicrobials.com or at fine bee supply stores everywhere.

Jeff: While you're at the strong microbial site, make sure you click on and subscribe to The Hive, their regular letter full of interesting beekeeping facts and product debate. Hey, everybody, welcome back to this show. Sitting across this big virtual table right now is Dr. Lars Chittka, author of the book, The Mind of the Bee. Dr. Chittka Lars, welcome to Beekeeping Today podcast. I've been looking forward to talking to you.

Lars Chittka: Hi there. Hi, everyone. I'm looking forward to talking to you guys as well.

Kim: That's good. It's nice to meet you. finally. I have spent some amazing hours reading your book.

Lars: I'm so glad you enjoyed it.

Kim: [laughs] I did.

Jeff: Your book came out and made a big splash. Before we get to the big topic of the book and the mind of the bee and obviously the question of consciousness and everything, let's talk a little bit about, how does the bee perceive the world? It's so small and people think it's just an insect, but your research and research of others indicate there's a lot going on in that little package.

Lars: Indeed. First of all, the sensory world of a bee is very rich. We often talk about our sensors as having a limited number of just smell and sight and touch and taste and so on. A bee has all of these sensors, but it also has some more. It can also sense magnetic fields, it's sensitive to electrostatic fields and so on. Even within the sensory modalities that are familiar to us, such as sight, a bee's perception is very different from ours. Bees can see ultraviolet light, the light that gives us sunburn, but we can't actually see it, we can just see the effects of it. On the other end, the bee can't see as far into the red, into long wavelengths as we can.

Its whole spectrum is shifted to shorter wavelengths. It can also see polarized light, which, again, we can't at all. That's the direction in which light swings. This polarized light is very useful if you're using the sun as a compass as bees do because sometimes the sun's not visible, it's behind a cloud or it's behind a mountain or just behind the horizon. In that case, you can use the pattern of polarized light in the sky to reconstruct where the sun is. You have your recover, your sun compass even if you can't see the sun currently using polarized light, the direction of waves in which the light swings.

That's a remarkable ability that we can't even imagine how it might look. All of this means that, not just the bee's sensory world, very rich and very fascinating, but it also means that the world we perceive is not the real or the physical world. We see some parts of that real world and the bee sees different aspects of it

Jeff: As you're describing all the sensory inputs to the bee's mind, it makes me think instantly of the psychedelic movies of the 60s where you have all this unbelievable sensory input that, as humans, we might perceive as weird and different and expanding and everything else, but it's just part of the everyday world.

Lars: Indeed. Seeing ultraviolet light, if we make it visible and look at flowers through specialized camera equipment that makes the UV visible, looks very psychedelic, but for a bee, that's its normal world. That's the world a bee sees when she's not high. Who knows what they might see if they are.

Jeff: [laughs]

Lars: They on occasion will consume some psychoactive substances. They will consume caffeine when it's offered to them in some nectars and some flora nectars that is available, or nicotine, even alcohol. They sometimes consume rotting fruits, which are still sweet. As a byproduct of the sweetness, they also imbibe the liquor and so on, but who knows what they might perceive under such conditions?

Jeff: Absolutely. You think about that and you think, well, if they see so much normal, I wonder what their altered state perception of the world is. That's mind-blowing. [laughs]. We're off topic. Sorry about that.

Kim: Like I said, I spent a lot of hours with your book. At the end of the book, I went back through it again. I certainly encourage people to look at this book twice because by the time you get to the end, the first few pages, you're going to think of them very differently, but the big question to me is, are bees conscious?

Lars: That's a very good and very difficult question. Why is it difficult? Because in any entity that can't talk to us, whether that's an artificial intelligence system, a robot, a dog, or a bee, there's still no single excepted proof by which you can say, "Now that thing is definitely conscious." We have exactly that same discussion currently with AI and that illustrates that it's a difficult question. It's a difficult question even in some humans. If you imagine that until a few decades ago, newborn children were often operated on without anesthesia because doctors thought they're not conscious.

They thought, "All this kicking and screaming is just reflexes, but they don't actually experience anything." That's just in the 1980s that were still the prevailing view. The disadvantage that the poor babies had was, well, they couldn't actually use words to complain. This is the difficulty that we're facing when studying whether any animal has consciousness and awareness of the world it. There's no single accepted proof, but what we can do is at least argue with common sense and probabilities. Using that approach, we can ask, is there evidence for a form of thinking? Consciousness, I guess, breaks down into two main components.

That is the capacity to think and the capacity to feel. Let's start with the question of whether there is evidence for a kind of thinking. Can bees display a form of intelligent behavior that shows that there is a little more going on than just associating colors with rewards, odors with rewards, which is something that bees do on an everyday basis when they're learning about flowers, but can they think things? I think from the evidence that we have, that looks at least likely. To give you some examples, we've trained bees to roll a little ball to a target destination. Very much like humans use a token and a vending machine or a coin, you have to put it in a particular place to get a reward.

Bees learned this so that it's a tool use and that in itself, of course, is not yet evidence for thinking. We played a little trick on an experiment where the bees learned this by observing each other. These are bumblebees we're talking about here, but I'm sure honeybees can do the same. One bee was a skilled trained ball roller and she always rolled the ball to be seen and observed by another bee that's never rolled a ball for a reward before. There were three balls available all at a different distance from the target area and we trained the experienced bee always to roll the furthest ball.

That didn't make much sense, but we trained her to do that because she learned that the other balls are glued down and that was what she showed to the observer bee three times.

Then we asked the observer bee, "How do you solve this task?" This was the crucial thing. This observer bee could now have just aped the demonstrator, copied the actions, or she could come up with a better solution by thinking about the problem by understanding what the desired end state is. Remarkably, when we put that observer bee on the spot, she spontaneously solved the task in a different way by rolling the closest ball, which was now not glued down.

She did that without trial and error spontaneously without further exploring which ball might be the best to roll. She came up with the solution by herself spontaneously without copying actions, but seemingly understanding what the desired goal is.

Kim: If I had three humans doing a similar task, one of them the farthest ball and then the next one coming up with a close, is part of this because, I don't know the term to use, are there different IQs in bees? Are there bees that are smarter than other bees just because they were born that way? There's a lot of people out there smarter than me I know. Is it the same with a beehive? Do you have a bell curve of IQs for at least certain tasks of all of the bees in a beehive?

Lars: Indeed, there is tremendous variation between individual bees and also between different beehives or bee colonies. People have bred honey bees that are very smart, very fast learners by just crossing offspring from fast learning colonies with other fast learning colonies and the offspring then learns even faster. You can do the same at the other end of the spectrum. You take the denser colonies, cross breed them, and find that you get slow learning offspring. Now that said, even within each hive or colony, there's still variation. There's still heritable variation and that includes psychological traits such as learning speed.

You find that with every task that we're testing bees with is that some individuals are very good, others not so good, so some are smarter than others. Where we measure the same individuals repeatedly, they generate reproducible results. It really is a personality trait, if you wish, not just random variation where one individual if tested repeatedly shows the same traits from one day to the next. With some tasks, there are some genius bees that solve tasks in ways that we hadn't even anticipated. In one experiment, for example, we wanted to know indeed whether learning speed as we measure it in the laboratory converts into better foraging performance when we let the bees forage freely.

The measurement of foraging performance required us to catch each bee when she departed. They all had little number tags so we could identify them. We caught them quickly, weighed the bee, measured the duration of this foraging flight and weighed it again when it returned from the field half an hour or an hour later. Then, of course, by measuring the weight difference, we knew how much she'd collected over how much time. The key result there was that indeed bees that learned faster also foraged better. The intelligence as measured in carefully controlled lab experiments also converted into better finding and identifying wildflowers with more nectar.

The remarkable thing was in all of this experiment, out of the hundreds of bees that we tested, there was one that didn't actually avoid being caught. We had these little dark containers in which we caught the bees, but she learned to actually basically use that container as a means of public transport and flew right into it every time she returned from a field trip and basically just didn't even try to get into the hive, but flew straight into the container, and then we moved it back to its hive. That was just one individual. No other individual tried that. We often find such Einstein individuals that solve a task in ways that we didn't even expect or much, much faster than other individuals.

Kim: I can see right now just sitting here listening to this, I can see down the road not too far from here, people who produce queen bees and the bees that those queens produce can be measured. I can measure how smart my bees are or the queens that my bees are going to produce and I can use that as a marketing advantage. Am I way out left field here or is that something that you can see possibly happening? You have bees that are defensive, you have bees that are all sorts of traits. Here's another one. My bees are smarter than your bees.

Lars: It is possible, of course. You already know that there are differences between bee colonies, beehives in terms of their aggression levels. People have known that for centuries and have removed colonies that were just unmanageable, for example. Yes, you can also select for learning speed. We still don't know the disadvantages of rapid learning. You might imagine that if there are only advantages to being fast with your learning, then evolution would already have produced the fastest bees possible. There must be some advantage in being dumb, so to speak. We haven't identified these advantages yet in bees, but some other dumb bees persist.

They get by, so there must be some advantages perhaps also to slow learning. One might be indeed that learning requires quite a bit of brain power, perhaps higher energetic needs and so on. It's costly and also the maintenance of memories might be costly. There might be disadvantages also to rapid learning in some circumstances.

Jeff: Let's take this opportunity to appreciate the average and slow bees while we take a quick break in hear from our sponsor

Betterbee: At Betterbee, we know you have many options for where you choose to get your wooden hive boxes and frames. We work closely with our sister company, Humble Abodes in Maine, to bring you high quality wooden wear featuring tight fit assembly available in a variety of great options to meet your needs. Whether you choose select, commercial, or budget-grade boxes or frames, you can count on quality milling of locally sourced eastern white pine. Shop all wooden wear at betterbee.com.

[music]

Kim: I'm going to say it again, that also begs a question. As bees go through their life cycle, they begin as doing certain tasks and their behavior evolves into other tasks, other tasks until they're no longer here. Would a really smart bee who's just been born and is working to feed other larvae because that's the first job that she's given, is she going to stay smarter than some of the other bees that's in the same cohort that she's in all the way through or are there smart bee feeders and that same bee may be a dumb forager?

Lars: It's theoretically possible. Unfortunately, for better or for worse, many of these intelligence tests, bees learning abilities are done once bees have already made that transition from a nurse bee, a wax constructing bee, a hive entrance defender bee, a guard bee to foraging and we're just looking in the later stages. It's interesting that at that transition from within hive duties to working outside the hive, certain parts of the brain develop and grow. The mushroom bodies, these are centers of associative learning and multisensory integration.

They're actually relatively small in the nurse bees and part of their pre-programmed development is that these brain parts grow in preparation for that transition to becoming a forager bee and they grow further as the bee accumulates more experience. Part of the intelligence so to speak, or the brainpower for it evolves or develops during a bee's lifetime. That doesn't mean that there aren't also intelligent components to what a bee does within the hive. The construction of wax and the beautiful regularity that we're seeing there might, by all means, involve, not just tired wired routines but sometimes also intelligent solutions.

We know too little about it or remembering which larvae I've just fed and moving onto other larvae where the provisioning has happened further in the past. These are all things that we haven't sufficiently explored yet to know how much innate behavior is in that and how much do they actually have to keep track intelligently of what they're doing.

Kim: I've got to wonder then in a cohort of bees from the same queen and the same sperm donor of drones, so you've got nearly identical bees, some may learn faster, some may not. It's easy to make the assumption that they're all going to be very similar as they progress. What happens with diet? Is the quality of the diet going to affect some group that doesn't get enough of some part of their diet and the other group that gets enough or even more? Do you see that as a, I'm going to say, a tool, but maybe that is a tool?

Jeff: I'll even add to that before you answer, Lars, is the impact of environmental chemicals to the learning process to the bee.

Lars: Indeed, yes. Part of the natural process is, of course, I guess one of the most spectacular differences that can be induced by differences in nutrition is the difference between queen bees and worker bees because they're actually genetically indistinguishable. The same egg can turn either into a worker or a queen and you all know what that means. It's a huge difference in size, it's a difference in lifestyle, it's a difference in how long they live. A queen can live up to seven years in extreme cases, whereas a worker typically just lives for a few weeks. All that's required for that huge difference, it's like two different species of animals basically is the difference in nutrition.

Is the difference that the queen larvae get fed royal jelly whereas the workers don't or only to a much lesser extent. All the difference there that we see between these two types of bees is induced by differences in nutrition, so a huge difference. You can start with the same genome, put that egg into either a queen cup or a regular worker cell and its fate is decided right there, but you can swap them around, of course, and turn them into the respective opposite outcome. To a lesser extent, of course, this can happen in between worker bees.

The differences there are much more extreme, for example, in bumblebees, which I'm sure you're also familiar with, the fact that bumblebees are much more variable in size of a single nest, are much more variable in size than our honeybees. In part that is the result of differences in how much food they got. There are some individual bumblebees that are basically the size of houseflies, whereas others are almost the size of a queen from the same nest and that depends on how much food they've been fed. Beyond that, Jeff, as you said, there is, of course, beyond just being fed innocent goods from flowers such as nectar and pollen.

Of course, flowers are often contaminated by neonicotinoids or other pesticides, herbicides that are sprayed on and around plants that are brought back by bees that don't instantly kill them, of course, because the chemicals tend to be reasonably diluted in nectar, which is I guess why it initially was felt that there isn't anything to be worried about. The collateral damage that bees are exposed to by collecting these toxic substances is huge. It affects bee's learning behavior, it affects their orientation, it affects their foraging performance, and ultimately, their survival and the fitness of the colonies.

There are all kinds of ways in which these substances, even though they don't instantly kill, are very harmful for bees. To add a note here, I think honeybees are actually still comparatively well off because we look after them. We're at least to some extent able to buffer the adverse effects of the chemicals, but all the wild bees are there, have no beekeeper who will try to ensure that they're at least reasonably healthy, and so on. There effects are entirely unmitigated, and of course, push many wild bees species to the brink of extinction.

Jeff: When we're talking in the context of development, I would assume that the effects of chemicals and environmental pressures, whatever that might be, can affect the cognitive abilities of an adult bee too. You could have your super smart bee, and then they get exposed to something, and then suddenly, like anybody else, any other living creature, they suddenly are not impaired. They're impaired somehow.

Lars: Indeed. The deceptive thing, the risky thing is that you don't instantly spot the adverse effects because the bees don't just drink the nectar and kill over and die. They just learn more poorly, more bees get lost, they bring back less nectar. All of this in combination with other diseases might switch in, which also transmit viruses and so on. All of this in combination, of course, means there is often a combination of stressors that results in colony losses.

Jeff: Does a bee know that it's learning from another bee? Do you think it says, "Hey, Sally over there is smart. She figured it out"? Do you think there's that interplay between individual bees?

Lars: I suspect not in bees. I suspect that they can't individually recognize one another. It's not entirely out of reach for insects because we know that there are wasp species with very small colonies, like a dozen workers which have very highly individualized face markings and they actually know each other on a nest like that. In honeybees, I suspect that they're too indistinguishable individually to know that Sally over there, but they can certainly learn from one another.

The fact that we see that some bees when they're observing, like the ball rolling technique, for example, when they're improving it spontaneously, is not a matter of personal ambition, "Hey, I want to be better than Sally," but simply understanding what the nature of the task is and then doing it better because that ultimately generates more nectar to solve a task with less energy expenditure and in a quicker way. The way in which they learn by observing each other in multiple ways, of course, is amazing. We knew already, of course, through Karl von Frisch's work and so on for decades that bees have this dance language by which they can learn from each other about locations.

We all know this as beekeepers and it seems perhaps unsurprising, but I just sometimes want to remind ourselves just how amazing this is because no other animal does anything like that. Other animals, if they found food, they can call from the location where they found the food or in primates, you sometimes find that they actually physically guide a group of relatives to a target, but a bee doesn't have to do that. She can tell others in the hive inside the darkness of the hive where the food is using the dance language, using symbols essentially.

The dance-attending bee learns the coordinates of the target, of the location where the food has been found or when the swarming learns the location of the potential new nesting location. Stores it in her little head and then applies it outside the hive once she's left in the hive in special and temporal removal from where she's learned the information. That's a highly specialized form of learning socially, of learning from each other, but a unique one that no other animal does in that form except a dozen or so honeybee species.

Then what we found more recently, I've already mentioned the ball rolling example, so we also tested the bees' flower preferences so they can observe other bees and look which kind of colors of flowers they're visiting, and then just copy each other. In that sense, Darwin already suspected that honeybees might learn from bumblebees, for example, and that is true. They can learn not just from members of the same species, but also by observing what flowers are visited by other species, and then copy these choices.

Jeff: That's interesting because the current debate and discussion right now about honeybees being more intrusive, overpowering native species on plants and flowers and other pollinating plants in the states especially, that's an interesting observation.

Lars: Yes, they are. Honeybees, of course, are very numerous, so if you're just thinking about the numbers there, of course, a beehive with 60,000 individuals on average will harvest what 60,000 individual solitary bees might harvest and indeed more because, of course, honeybees don't just provide a bit of nutrition for the few offspring, but they generate a huge surplus. That's a nature of honeybees, of course, to store food for the winter months and so on. On top of that, of course, a honeybee colony is a smoothly oiled machine.

Through its organization and communication system, they are very, very efficient at exploiting food sources. The more honeybees there are, the tougher that gets for the little cottage industries that are little bumblebee hives are indeed solitary bees.

Kim: I'm going to stretch this back just a half and go back to, I'm going to say, the bell curve of IQs in a group of bees. Are the smarter bees altruistic? Do they observe what's going on and say, "I'm faster, I'm smarter, I'm better, I can do more work" or do they take two steps back and say, "I'm not working that hard. Let those guys do the work. I'm going to sit here and watch and just take it easy"? Is either of those behaviors at all possible, visible, however, you want to look at it?

Lars: It's possible to test that, but so far we haven't seen that smarter bees are lazier, for example. I guess one beautiful thing about a bee colony is that indeed, to some extent, everyone works together and for the common good. In that, I think it's a little different from a human society where everyone is at least, to some extent, a bit selfish. The altruism of a majority generates some individuals or it generate a niche for some individuals to free ride. I don't think that we find that to the same extent in bee colonies. There are some individuals that work more and some that work less, but everyone tries their best, I think, no matter if they're smart or less smart.

[laughter]

Kim: Interesting. You have, I want to say, opened the door to a million more questions on how bee keepers need to or should be looking at management techniques at housing, at nutrition, all sorts of things given the fact that all of those little bugs in that box have an opinion of what you're doing. Am I close there?

Lars: There is evidence, for example, that they can recognize at least images of human faces. We have not yet tested that they can actually recognize live humans. Of course, beekeepers are interested in that question, do my bees know me? At least it's plausible, so they're certainly smart enough to do that. The tough challenge compared to the experiments that we did with images of human faces is that humans from one day to the next will wear different clothes, they might wear different scents and so on, and of course, we might be difficult to recognize in a beekeeper suit.

I think the, for me at least, the reason for treating our bees well is not necessarily that they judge us, but because we owe it to them. We owe it to them for the obvious reasons, that is bees do useful things for us, not just pollinate our crops, but they also provide a tremendously useful ecosystem service by pollinating wild plants. I think there's, from our work on the intelligence and the possible sentience of bees, another aspect, and that is that if you're dealing with a sentient being, and as I said at the start, we have to be honest, the jury is still out on that, but I think we have reasonably good evidence to say that it's at least likely that bees feel something.

Then that comes with a moral obligation to look well after these beings. In the same way as we feel that if we have a bunch of rabbits in our garden, even if at the end we slaughter them or something, then at least we owe them that we treat them nicely until that day. The same, I think, is the case for bees, to the extent that there is at least a reasonable probability that they might be capable of suffering, for example, from the chemicals that they're now often exposed to. Then that comes with an obligation for us to treat them as well as we possibly can.

Kim: This comes at a time, as you're probably aware, that there are lots of people who deal with animals in our environment. We are changing maybe too slow, maybe not fast enough, but how we care for them. Chickens and cages and pigs and farrowing pens that are way too small. People are taking a step back and going, is this a good thing to do to an animal that thinks and feels and has an opinion and all of these things? I think what you have done is you have just opened another door here to bees and beekeepers.

Lars: Indeed and I am fully aware that 20, 30 years ago, that opinion would have been regarded probably as crazy or at least strange. The point is we are using the same tests of sentience, of intelligence, as people working on vertebrates. We're finding many similar things. That isn't to say that bees aren't also in many ways different from chickens and pigs and so on. At least for the questions of whether they might have simple emotion-like states and whether they can solve certain intelligence tests, we're using the same paradigms. We're not lowering the bar.

We are finding that at least by the same criteria, that they probably merit some welfare considerations. At least it's something to be aware of and err on the side of caution when we're dealing with these animals.

Jeff: Anybody who's kept bees will obviously understand what you're saying and can say, "Yes, I've thought the same thing." I will freely admit that as I've read your book, every page I found something that I could just ponder on for a long time. It's a fascinating read and I encourage everybody to get the book, The Mind of a Bee, and read it multiple times as Kim suggests. What I want to ask, of everything you've learned and studied over your career and in preparation of this book, what is one thing that just still amazes you that you sit there and as you're drinking your pint or your glass of wine or whatever, that you sit there and you spend your free time thinking about? What amazes you?

Lars: It's hard to point to a single discovery. I think people have said before that the study of bees is something like a magic well, but it's the more you draw from it, the more it gives you. When, for example, we first saw that bees were able to count or recognize images of human faces, we couldn't believe what we were seeing. To have a crime witness test, for example, with a number of black and white photos and the bees locate the correct one where they've previously got rewards, like, whoa, what is going on here? The same with the ball-rolling tasks that I've mentioned. We've trained bees to pull strings for rewards and, again, copy that from each other.

No one would have thought these things to be possible just a few years ago. It's perhaps sad that I can't actually show them to you in this audio interview, but if you see these behaviors, it's overwhelming. It's like you're seeing something from another planet and that keeps going on. I'm sure that even after I'm gone, people will still discover new things about bees behavioral capacities that no one thought possible today, tomorrow even. They are a wonderful organism to study.

Jeff: Is there anything you're working on now that you want to give us a peek at what you're working on or can we invite you back in a bit and you can talk about your next bit of research?

Lars: You're welcome to ask me again in a year or two, but one of the things we're currently working on is something, it's called the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, where in this case, human subjects are asked to sort cards by different rules, either the number that's displayed or the color or increasing or decreasing sequences, and so on. Basically, it's about paying attention. It's about how quickly do you catch on when a rule has changed without anyone telling you. It seems that bees can also do that. Focusing your attention on different rules is a hallmark of intelligent and flexible behavior and it seems bees pass that test as well.

Jeff: We'll get on your calendar here real soon because I could sit here and fill the rest of the year talking to you about your subject, The Mind of the Bee. Again one last time, I encourage everybody to go out there and grab that book and read it. It is worth your time.

Kim: After having spent so much time with your book and then be able to ask those questions that you left dangling on that page, I got to answer that question and move on. This has been very thorough, very entertaining. Thank you very much for being with us.

Lars: Thank you, guys. A very interesting conversation.

Jeff: Thank you.

[music]

Kim, this interview with Lars was everything I hoped it'd be because it's such a fascinating topic; consciousness and honeybees.

Kim: It has nothing to do about adding supers or keeping your bear fence in shape and all of the things that beekeepers have to worry about on a day-to-day basis. If you get this book or you get to listen to this podcast, take two steps back and think about what else is going on out there To get this book, it's available on Amazon and it's available on Northern Bee Books and probably other places and from the publisher. Take a look and be ready to sit down with a big bottle of wine because it's going to take you a while to get through this book, but it's worth every minute.

Jeff: [laughs] Yes. References earlier to the 60s. Psychedelic references was just illustrative purposes, not a recommendation. This hot summer, I've had two chicken waters on my back porch where the bees from the bee yard have learned to come up and it's just buzzing with bees literally every afternoon. After reading this book about bee consciousness and how they perceive the world, social learning, what's going on in that brain of the bee brain as it learns and watching them at the social interactions at the water fountains, for me, it's almost overwhelming because there's just so much going on to consider. Fantastic. Hope everybody enjoyed this.

Kim: Yes, it was good.

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts or wherever you download and stream the show Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews along the top of any webpage. We want to thank our regular episode sponsors: Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and especially Betterbee for their longtime support of this podcast. Thanks to Northern Bee Books for their generous support.

Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you, the Beekeeping Today Podcast listener for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions or comments at "leave a comment" section under each episode on the website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.