Grumpy? Giddy? According to some measures, bees appear to experience moods.
Image: Charles Krebs/Corbis
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If you have never watched bees carefully, you are missing out. Look closely as they gently curl and uncoil their mouthparts around food, and you will sense that they are not just eating but enjoying their meal. Watch a bit more, and the hesitant flicks and sags of their antennae seem to convey some kind of emotion. Do those twitches signal annoyance? Or something like enthusiasm?
Whether bees really experience any of these emotions is an open scientific question. It is also an important one, with implications for how we should treat not just bees but the great majority of animals. Recently studies by Melissa Bateson and her colleagues at Newcastle University in England have rekindled the debate over these issues by showing that honeybees may experience something akin to moods.
Using simple behavioral tests, Bateson’s team showed that honeybees under stress tend to be pessimistic. Other tests have demonstrated that monkeys, dogs and starlings all tend to react similarly under duress and likewise see the proverbial glass as half empty. Although this finding does not—and cannot—prove that bees experience humanlike emotions, it does give pause. We should take seriously the possibility that insects, too, have emotions.
Beeline to the Brain
First, a little bit about bees. They are members of the diverse group of animals lacking backbones—indeed, more than 95 percent of all animal species are invertebrates. Despite the varied and often nuanced behaviors they can exhibit, invertebrates are sometimes regarded as life’s second string, a mindless and unfeeling band of alien critters. If that seems somewhat melodramatic, just consider our willingness to boil some of them alive.
Those judgments tend to arise from arguments about invertebrates’ failure to demonstrate the behaviors we usually associate with a pain response. Whereas the yelps and grimaces of other mammals are familiar to us as announcements of hurt, invertebrates can appear to take their injuries in stride. Insects are commonly observed using their crushed limbs with undiminished force when walking, for example, and a locust will reportedly carry on with a meal while it is being eaten by a mantis.
Other attempts to draw a dividing line between creatures that feel and those that do not are rooted in comparative brain anatomy. Invertebrates lack a cortex, an amygdala and many of the other major brain structures routinely implicated in human emotion. Their nervous systems are quite minimalist compared with ours: we have roughly 100,000 bee brains’ worth of neurons in our head. Some invertebrates, however, including insects, do possess a rudimentary version of our stress response system. So the question remains: Do they experience emotion in a way that we would recognize, or do they simply react to the world with an elaborate set of reflexes?
To gain some traction on this fascinating question, Bateson’s team followed the lead of recent investigations on “pessimistic biases” in animals. In humans, the pessimistic bias refers to our well-known tendency to perceive threats or anticipate negative outcomes more frequently when we are feeling anxious or depressed. For example, in tests where people are shown ambiguous statements such as “the doctor examined little Emily’s growth,” anxious individuals are less likely than others to conclude that Emily is fine and only her height was being checked.
Although the link between bad moods and negative judgments may not be terribly surprising, this correlation is still useful. We rely on it in our daily lives to make informed guesses about how people are feeling by observing their actions and choices. Scientifically, we can use it to study the emotions of creatures unable to tell us directly how they feel. The key here is to set up a controlled situation where animals encounter an ambiguous stimulus—think of it as a nonverbal version of the Emily statement.
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12 Comments
Add CommentWhat is more, during hard times, they are kicked out of the hives & never having been taught to fend for themselves, they starve.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAny beekeeper can tell you, they most definitely experience moods. 99% or more are frustrated females by the way :).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisImagine that!A living breathing creature has emotions lol ...Humans never cease to amaze me with their superiority complex.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAh, the tiny note in the abandoned hive may now be deciphered.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Tired of the queen replacement thing. So long, & thanks for all the pollen."
Well said! :)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe typical argument against animal emotions is that we can't prove their actions are not evolved response systems.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUsing that logic, we've never actually proven that humans have emotions.
I know I have them- but how do I know that everyone else just doesn't have evolved response systems.
That said, it IS easier to recognise that animals more similar to ourselves have emotions than those dissimilar- and perhaps this skepticism is a correct response- we shouldn't make assumptions that two distantly related organisms behave the same way.
I do hope we all will try to be good to all animals though. Give them the benefit of the doubt- that they could, and probably do have emotion- even bugs.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://bitly.com/vfUWTU
Yeah, basically it boils down to the whole "what is consciousness" question. Probably not something that can ever be addressed by any type of logic or observation. In fact I would say that these types of questions lack validity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAll we can probably ultimately say is that our own theories of mind have some level of applicability to bees etc. Not really surprising as other posters have said.
More interesting questions might be to what degree we share the same neurophysiology in this regard. That kind of information has real utility.
The first two posts have been deleted. Without one of them, my first post does not make sense. The deleted post referred to the drone bees. The male bee. The fact that they have no status or duties was jocularly referred to.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The stress of shaking had turned them into pessimists that interpreted the ambiguous odor as half threatening rather than half appetizing." Was it really affective stress or some physiological stress/disorientation like vertigo that makes one uninterested in, or perhaps even unable, to fully sense and approach pleasurable stimuli? When I emerge from the whirling carnival ride, is that the same affective state as when I am worrying about my responsibilities, relationships, survival, etc.? The result of the carnival ride may be stress insofar as my sensory experience and neural correlates have been altered, and I'm having a different, uncomfortable, experience. That seems to be a different experience than the affective anthropomorphic pessimism/stress that this article wonders about our little friends of all kinds having. Does that make sense?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think the question would be how long it lasts. Maybe also what happens when you subject bees to other stresses or repeated stresses.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisO Fine, -
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthe things that have emotion(s) are growing in numbers among men.
my tree and my stone also have them, but not the same way: something like the wind.