A bee that dreams of flowers

In a few weeks it will be time: spring begins. Fruit trees are going to bloom en masse. If you walk under it, you will soon hear the buzz of dozens of bees. Collecting nectar and pollen is vital for the bee. Social species such as honeybees and bumblebees visit flowers to feed their queen’s larvae in the nest. But each flower blooms at a different time, and grows in a different place around the nest. The bee must therefore have a far-reaching navigation system, you realize when reading Lars Chittka’s book The consciousness of the bee. That stems from consciousness rather than from instinct, the writer argues.

Lars Chittka is a leading scientist in the physiology and psychology of flower visiting insects. It is therefore a pleasure to get answers from an expert to so many mysteries surrounding the bee.

Taste with your feet

In his first chapter, Chittka immediately immerses you in the world of the bee. He makes you realize how different the world must look through the eyes of a bee. Bees do not see red, but they do see ultraviolet light. So flowers look completely different to them. They also have tactile senses on their feet, which they can use to taste whether they have stepped into something. A bee’s life revolves around flowers, and her brain and senses are arranged for that. The bee must be able to recognize a flower, remember where the flower is from the nest, and communicate its location to hive mates – or find a new location by following her sisters in a bee dance.

The book follows a logical progression from a bee’s senses and navigation, through learning, nerves, and brain, to finally answering the big questions about bee personality and consciousness. The surprising thing about this book is that it shares the latest insights in science, but also brings a lot of knowledge from past centuries out of oblivion. For example, it turns out that some thinkers were way ahead of their time, and Chittka simultaneously makes short shrift of old ways of thinking that an insect is a machine driven by instincts.

Bumblebees each have their own style of foraging, according to transmitter research. Some workers invariably visit one spot with flowers, others roam the entire landscape.

Each chapter alternates scientific discoveries with anecdotes about the people behind the research. These anecdotes break the sometimes technical explanation into manageable chunks. The author substantiates the insights about bees in detail with results of experiments, so that you can follow the research from idea and observation to conclusion, often accompanied by an illustration. For example, there is a test with bumblebees, the so-called tug-of-war puzzle. In addition, a fake flower covered with nectar lies under a plexiglass table. The bumblebee only gets to the nectar reward when it pulls a string to bring the flower closer. Only two of more than a hundred bumblebees manage to do this. But even better: inexperienced bumblebees who watch the tug-of-war from a distance can then perform the trick themselves: the bees learn from each other. Each chapter ends with a summary, which helps keep the big picture in mind.

It is noticeable from the sometimes difficult terms and long sentences that this is Chittka’s first popular science book. A word like “edge orientation detector neurons” is nice for Scrabble, but makes the text difficult to read. In addition, the translation from English sometimes causes confusion or crazy sentences. The bee is regularly referred to as ‘he’ or ‘his’ (the English may leave that in the middle with ‘it/its’). Confusing, because it concerns workers who are – as the name says – female. It is mainly the worker bees that this book revolves around and the conclusions about consciousness and intelligence. Despite these hurdles, the book is well worth your while, with a wealth of information packed together compactly.

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Bee Poetry

As a reader I have regularly been amazed by the brain of the bee. For example, bees also know where the sun is when it is cloudy, because they can sense the direction of vibration of light particles passing through the clouds. And they show brain waves during their sleep, which indicates the processing of information from different parts of the brain. If you offer another scent to bees in deep sleep, this will strengthen the bee’s memory of the past day’s experiences. The author alludes to the idea that bees dream.

Bit by bit, the chapters form a meticulous argument that builds up with a nice tension curve to the key question: does the bee have a consciousness? The author states without question that bees have some form of consciousness, and also refutes counterarguments. According to him, the individual senses or nerve circuits of the bee can be performed well by robots without consciousness, but the totality of behavior and abilities of the bee requires a very complicated robot. If we assume a bee with consciousness, then its brain is not only more flexible, but it also requires less processing power and fewer nerve cells, according to the author. Consciousness is therefore a simpler explanation for the complex behavior of the bee than assuming that the animal can unscrupulously perform all kinds of actions on automatic pilot.

How does a honey bee find this flower?

If we see the bee as a self-aware individual with its own emotions, preferences and its own story, this will also help to better protect the animal, according to Chittka. This is also apparent from a London project that he describes in which thousands of bees were given a number sticker. The Londoners saw the bees popping up in their own garden. A bee visits the same lavender flowers over and over again – until one day she disappears, leaving the residents sad. The bee as a conscious creature creates a bond, and that is exactly what this book wants to achieve.