Mark Megahan
Those honey making bees buzzing around your flower garden aren’t the mindless drones everyone thinks they are. In their off time, they like to have fun. Researchers at Queen Mary University in London decided to toss some toys into the hive and see what would happen. Bumblebees, it turns out, really love to play ball.
Bees go bananas over wooden balls
When a lab full of bees learned to roll some wooden balls around, researchers called it the first known case of insects engaging in “play.” The way bumblebees manipulate the spheres consistently in a whole series of new experiments leads to the conclusion they know what they’re doing.
The animals “repeatedly engage in behavior that does not provide them with food, shelter or another immediate benefit.” That’s the official definition of play as a behavior.
All sorts of animals play with all sorts of inanimate objects. With mammals and birds, play is generally taken for granted but there has never been a “record of the behavior in insects until now.”
Bees, it seems, are smarter than the average bug. Smart enough to be considered “sentient.” Play is a big clue to researchers that a particular group of organisms has self-awareness. Things like “inner feelings and experiences.”
As Samadi Galpayage explains, “Eventually, this can tell us something more about whether bees are sentient.” He’s a graduate student working with Professor Lars Chittka and lead author on the new study.
It was published for peer review on Thursday, October 27. They did the same tests on squid and octopus like cephalopods and learned they’re pretty bright as well.
Do it for fun
All the way back in 2017, Dr. Chittka and other scientists taught bees to roll balls in exchange for a sugary prize. For his experiment, Galpayage postulated that ball rolling could be a form of “play.” To prove it, they had to take the reward away.
“First, they set up a system that let bumblebees move in an unobstructed path to a sucrose solution in a feeding area. Along the path’s sides, the researchers placed small wooden balls of varying colors, some fastened to the floor and some loose.”
Bumblebees in the experiment “could access the sucrose without interacting with the balls at all.” After watching for more than 54 hours, “the team observed each of the experiment’s 45 bees contributing to 910 total ball-rolling actions.”
They really seemed to be enjoying it. “Some bees returned again and again, moving the balls in various patterns.” The bumblebees knew the balls had nothing to do with food.
The researchers found that “feeding and ball-rolling activities happened at different times and frequencies, indicating that the bumblebees had different motivations for the two actions.” Besides that, younger males were the most interested in play activity.
They even learned a few games. “In a later experiment, the scientists trained the bees to associate ball rolling with a certain chamber color. The bees then preferentially chose to enter that color chamber even when it was empty.“
