In the early twentieth century Austrian Karl von Frisch took on the scientific establishment with his unorthodox views and audacious experiments involving flowers and pollinating insects—especially honIeybees. Von Frisch eventually won a Nobel Prize for a lifetime of work, including his description of the honeybee’s “waggle dance,” which communicates to other bees the exact location of food. “The life of bees is a magic well,” he writes: “The more one draws from it, the more richly it flows.”
Ethologist and ecologist Lars Chittka considers himself a scientific “descendant” of von Frisch. In his book, The Mind of a Bee, Chittka condenses three decades of his own investigations into a riveting tale of bee behavior, cognition, and even self-awareness. He writes, “Understanding the minds of alien life-forms is not easy, but if you relish the challenge, you don’t have to travel to outer space to find it. Alien minds are right here, all around you.”
Born in Germany in 1963, Chittka calls his decision to go into biology “completely uninformed.” He chose it as a major at the University of Göttingen in northwestern Germany because he thought of biologists as people who spent lots of time in nature. But he also dreamed of being a novelist or a rock musician, and he wanted to move to West Berlin for the arts subculture there. A professor told him this was a terrible idea. Career suicide. “They only plan revolutions there. Don’t do it.” When the professor saw the disappointment on Chittka’s face, he said, “Well, I think there’s one good lab, but they’re working on bees.”
Chittka studied in the bee lab at the Free University of Berlin, getting his PhD under his mentor, Randolf Menzel. A key moment for him was the day the professor said, “No one can leave until they see a dancing bee.” The class went to an observation hive to look at the inner workings. “It looked like some alien civilization,” Chittka says, “with hundreds of bees all doing different things, all dedicated to something that was mysterious. That was the moment that got me hooked.”
Fluent in several languages, Chittka has held posts at Stony Brook University in the US and the University of Würzburg in Germany. He is the founder of the Research Centre for Psychology at Queen Mary University of London, where he is a professor of sensory and behavioral ecology, and the coauthor of more than 250 articles about animal intelligence, social learning among insects, and plant evolution. He never quite abandoned his artistic aspirations, though. His band, Killer Bee Queens, has a postpunk album called Strange Flowers, which includes the song “I Stung Gwyneth Paltrow.” He has also collaborated with installation artist Julian Walker on a sci-art project titled “Do Bees Like van Gogh’s Sunflowers?”
I talked to Chittka via video chat in 2024 while he was living in Mexico for part of the summer. He displayed a typically dry German sense of humor as he led me through the sometimes difficult-to-understand aspects of a bee’s inner life. He often spoke of the bees in second person (“If you’re a bee, you can use compass sense”), putting the listener in the place of the insects he studied.
Leviton: Bees evolved 120 million years ago from carnivorous wasps, yet bees are vegan. Do we know how this happened?
Chittka: Bees essentially are wasps. Most people don’t realize that. We think bees are the likable ones, whereas wasps rank among the most annoying insects. But the main difference between them is one of diet. Wasps feed their larvae meat, which makes them interested in our summer barbecues, whereas bees have an exclusively flower-based diet, so they ignore our food at the garden party. Wasps came first, and at some point in evolutionary history, certain wasps switched diets.
Numerous other aspects of bees’ and wasps’ lives remained the same, though. Many species build nests, for example. Wasps are often solitary, and so are some bees. Social bees have a queen and lots of workers, the same as colonies of wasps. Both groups of animals typically have a home base—a nest to which they return with provisions. To some extent wasps also visit flowers. They fuel up with nectar, which they use as an energy source. But while bees use pollen for protein, wasps use prey.
Leviton: Insects have been around since the Ordovician period, about 480 million years ago. We know there were plants then, but were there flowers?
Chittka: Flowers don’t easily fossilize, so we don’t have an exact date for when they appeared. It was somewhere between 150 and 250 million years ago. Before that, plant reproduction was a fairly messy business. The male plants would throw their pollen into the air, hoping some of it would reach their female counterpart. That involves a fair deal of luck and a lot of waste.
At some point certain plants developed a trick: give insects and birds a little bit of food so they’ll come to the plants, and then they’ll carry some reproductive material—the pollen—to other plants. That’s how flowers were invented.
Leviton: You call flowers “natural puzzle boxes.”
Chittka: No two flower species are quite alike. Many allow fairly easy access to pollen and nectar, but some are like a floral puzzle with mechanics that can be as complicated as operating a lock. Snapdragons and monkshoods, for example, require bees to contort in difficult ways to get to the good stuff.
My postdoctoral mentor, James Thomson, and I did lots of experiments with artificial flowers and bumblebees that were raised from birth in the lab environment. To attract a bee, some sort of reward has to be on offer—typically nectar or pollen, or both. Scents and color are basically advertising. They tell the bee, “Come here for some food, try it out, and remember where you found it.” The insect might give it a try, but only if the advertising is backed up by a good product will it remember the packaging and return for more.
Leviton: How do bees find that location again? Are they using local landmarks, trial and error?
Chittka: Bees need a good spatial memory. They often fly five, six, even seven miles from their nest or hive, passing by lots of landmarks: cliffs, rivers, mountains, roads. All of these are useful, but if you’re a bee, you also have a compass sense. You use the sun as reference point for direction. Some experiments even hint that bees might have a kind of cognitive map that allows them to perform spatial operations that would be impossible if they had to rely only on route-based memories.
Leviton: Let’s talk about the sensory equipment of bees. The human brain has about 86 billion nerve cells, while a bee’s brain has only about a million. You call it “elegantly miniaturized.” How do they perceive their world?
Chittka: Bees see ultraviolet light, to which we are completely blind because it’s outside our visual spectrum. For bees it’s a color, and many flowers have adapted to that. The blooms present patterns in the ultraviolet spectrum that are entirely hidden from us. Where we might see a yellow flower, a bee sees a flower that is ultraviolet plus yellow. On the other end of the spectrum, however, bees do not see as far into the red as we do. A tomato for a bee would look gray or black.
Another sensory superpower of bees is that they can see polarized light—basically the direction that light swings. Humans can normally see polarized light only with special filters. Using the polarization pattern of light in the sky, bees can reconstruct the position of the sun even when it’s behind a cloud or beyond the horizon.
Their eyes are quite different from ours. Human eyes are forward-looking, and only one zone, the fovea centralis, has especially high resolution. Bees can see almost all the way around, because their eyes cover much of their heads. Their resolution is worse than ours, but to some extent that’s mitigated by the speed with which their eyes process information. The standard film has twenty-four frames per second, which we perceive as smooth movement. For a bee that’s a slideshow, not a moving image. Likewise, a fluorescent light that humans perceive as providing constant illumination, to a bee is stroboscopic: it goes on and off.
Leviton: How do a bee’s antennae work?
Chittka: They are a strange sense organ. They’re large, for one, sometimes longer than an insect’s leg. The antennae serve as sensors of smell and taste. That said, many insects can taste with their feet and with their tongue as well. For bees the antennae are also touch sensors that can be used to feel your way through a dark hive.
Leviton: Can’t bees also detect electrical fields?
Chittka: : Yes, using extremely sensitive hairs. You might have had the experience of rubbing a balloon against your skin and feeling your hairs stand on end. You are sensing an electric field. A bee’s hairs are drawn to certain objects based on their electrical charge. This is helpful because all flying objects, whether an insect or a jumbo jet, lose electrons and become positively charged, whereas flowers are negatively charged. So there’s a little exchange of electricity every time a bee lands on a flower. And a flower that has recently been visited by another bee has a different charge, which tells you not to visit because it has just been emptied! Bees can also smell if another bee has recently visited a flower.
Leviton: Do they detect the earth’s magnetic field?
Chittka: We know that bees and some other insects use the earth’s magnetic field, but we don’t yet understand the mechanisms. It’s a mystery to us.
All flying objects, whether an insect or a jumbo jet, lose electrons and become positively charged, whereas flowers are negatively charged. So there’s a little exchange of electricity every time a bee lands on a flower.
Leviton: I was fascinated to learn, in The Mind of a Bee, how you keep track of individual bees and monitor their behavior in your experiments.
Chittka: Yes, if you don’t mark individual animals to study them, then you won’t appreciate the differences in personalities. In many of our experiments we examine learning behavior, so it’s important for us to know which individual bee has had which experience and when. Since we can’t distinguish bees by sight, we have to tag them in various ways. In the nineteenth century bees were marked with little paint dots on their backs. In the twentieth century number tags became available; they are used by beekeepers to mark queens. We buy those tags by the hundreds and mark scores of bees in a hive. We glue the tags on the bees’ backs, so there’s no need to puncture a body part as you might do tagging the ear of a cow.
Leviton: Are the bees aware they’re carrying a foreign object?
Chittka: They do initially try to remove the tags by scratching them off, using the same grooming behavior that protects them from mites. In the case of the tags, however, they soon get used to them and stop scratching. This grooming behavior is also useful when visiting flowers. Depending on the flower morphology, the powdery pollen sticks to different parts of your body. To collect it efficiently, you want to groom yourself in those places where the pollen accumulates.
Leviton: Is there any grooming between bees?
Chittka: Yes. Honeybees, for example, have a distinct signal by which they invite other honeybees to groom locations they can’t reach themselves
Leviton: I’ve heard that bees dance to show the location of a food source to other bees, but until I read your book, it didn’t register that the dance is actually taking place in total darkness inside the hive. How does this work?
Chittka: Let me explain first how the dance encodes locations to tell others where an attractive food source is. This sort of communication is unique in the animal kingdom. Some animals will go sit at a destination and shout to everyone else, “Come here!” but bees can tell each other where food is using repeated movements.
To a human observer the dancing bee appears to move in a figure-eight: It runs ahead a few millimeters to centi-meters, then makes a semicircle, runs another straight line, makes another semicircle, and so on. This process is sometimes repeated for several minutes. Most of the information is encoded in the straight line. The longer the bee spends on the line, the farther away the food is. For instance, if she spends two seconds on the straight line, as a rough rule of thumb that tells other bees to fly two kilometers. Five seconds means approximately five kilometers.
The direction code is even more remarkable, because it uses gravity as a reference point: If the bee goes straight up, this tells other bees that, once they are outside the hive, they should fly in the direction of the azimuth of the sun. If the waggle run is straight down, then they should fly away from the sun. Forty-five degrees to the right of gravity tells other bees to fly at a forty-five-degree angle to the azimuth of the sun. The foraging bee needs to memorize this information relative to gravity, decode it, and then recalculate it in relation to the sun.
On top of all this, it’s pitch-dark in the hive. So what the audience does is touch the dancing bee. They put their antennae on the abdomen—basically the bum—of the bee and walk with her through this entire circuit multiple times.
Leviton: So when bees find good food sources, they share that information; they aren’t selfish about it.
Chittka: Within their own colony there is complete and open information sharing among members. Everyone is highly related. All the workers are sisters. But there is competition between bee colonies, and also between different species of bees.
If there is a dearth of nectar currently available at flowers, for instance, honeybees will sometimes enter a neighboring hive and steal nectar. There is a risk attached, because guard bees use their antennae to sniff out intruders and will bite and sting them to death. But, with experience, certain bees can learn to avoid the guards, and quite a bit of nectar-robbing goes on. Honeybees sometimes raid bumblebee colonies, and vice versa. Wasps will sneak into honeybee colonies. Once you get past the guards, you can essentially help yourself to a tummy-load of nectar that might take you two hours to get from flowers.
There are some bees who never cease exploring. With our radar we studied one who was always looking for better things but never settled down. That bee was an information specialist.
Leviton: You mentioned bees stinging. In evolutionary terms, it seems like a poor design to have a weapon that kills you when you wield it.
Chittka: Well, a bumblebee can sting you multiple times. The situation with honeybees is that their stingers are barbed, so if they sting an animal with an elastic skin—such as you and me—the stinger gets caught and rips out. It takes with it the poison gland and the nerve center that controls the pumping of the poison, though. So even after the bee is, for all practical purposes, dead, it’s still injecting you with poison.
A honeybee who stings a wasp or another bee, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily die, because the other insect’s skin is not elastic, and the honeybee may be able to retract the stinger. It’s only when honeybees attack mammals—badgers, bears, skunks, humans—that it’s inevitably the last thing the bee does.
And, remember, there might be forty, sixty, eighty thousand honeybees in a colony, so sacrificing a handful of them, if they succeed in repelling an attack, might still be worth it.
Leviton: This goes beyond simple “survival of the fittest” to survival of the colony.
Chittka: Indeed. Social animals often act for the benefit of the group. As I said, in honeybee colonies and other insect groups, the individuals are highly related. In a human family you might be willing to lay down your life to defend one of your children, because those are your genes you’re defending there. In a bee colony that’s even more the case. The level of relatedness is higher than that of most other animals, because of a specific form of sex determination. Humans have XY and XX chromosome determination, whereas in Hymenoptera—bees, ants, and wasps—females are diploid, having two sets of chromosomes, while the males have only a single set, making them haploid. This means males don’t have a father. They are basically generated by virgin birth: An unfertilized egg develops into a fully functional animal. The male generates clonal sperm, which means the genes from a father are identical. To produce diploid female workers or queens, all the eggs—which have normal genetic variability through recombination—are fertilized with clonal sperm. So all the female workers are very closely related to each other genetically.
Leviton: Are bees often successful in chasing intruders like bears away from their hives?
Chittka: It depends on the severity of the bees’ attack. If you’ve had a single bee sting, you’ll appreciate it is properly painful. Bees will attack the face and head of the bear, because it’s difficult to penetrate the thick hair of their body. For the bear the pain is a trade-off for the meal. At the very least, I think it teaches the bear a useful lesson.
Most animals will flee an attacker, but when you have a home to protect, like the honeybees do, fighting back is a better option. We have found honeybees don’t just sting when they are personally threatened. When a threat comes up—like a large, looming shape near the nest entrance—guard bees release an alarm pheromone, which signals workers to attack the potential intruder. And that pheromone also makes the guard bees less sensitive to bodily harm, in case they need to sacrifice themselves for the good of the hive.
Leviton: Let’s circle back to the technology you use to track bees in flight.
Chittka: Oh, yes. The tiny number tags aren’t particularly useful when you want to follow an insect over several miles. You’ll quickly lose sight of them. And bees do fly very long distances, often over terrain where you can’t easily run after them.
We can’t attach a transmitter to the bee, because there are no transmitters small enough. So since the mid-1990s scientists have used a technology called harmonic radar: We send a radar signal that is picked up by a device called a transponder on the bee’s back. The transponder weighs just fifteen milligrams—lighter than the nectar load they can carry. With that we can track a bee’s spatial whereabouts throughout her entire life, from the initial orientation flights outside the colony, when they are memorizing the landscape, to later foraging flights to find food patches. When those patches wither away, the bees then reorient to find new patches. In one case we followed a worker during 156 foraging bouts—until she disappeared from radar on the thirteenth day of her outdoor career, probably having been eaten by a bird or a crab spider.
Leviton: How long is a typical bee’s life?
Chittka: Workers live two, three, four weeks, depending on the species and on the individual’s luck. Queens in bumblebee colonies can live for a year, and honeybee queens can live for several years. In some termites, the queen’s lifespan can extend to decades.
Leviton: You referred to bees’ “personalities.” How do you define that?
Chittka: When you follow a bee for their entire life, you get to know them very well. You see the patterns and the differences. Most start with an exploratory phase, like humans trying on different jobs or activities in school. Later, like an assembly-line worker, most will work one particular patch of flowers and do nothing else. They will change their preference only if that patch becomes overexploited by other bees, or if the plants go out of bloom. But there are some bees who never cease exploring. With our radar we studied one who was always looking for better things but never settled down. That bee was an information specialist. She did get nutrition by visiting flowers, to keep her flight motor running, but she didn’t harvest much of a surplus for the colony.
Leviton: She considered herself an artist who doesn’t live by society’s rules. [Laughs.]
Chittka: You never know what that extended exploratory activity might be good for. It’s useful to have diverse personalities in the colony. In the honeybee colony, for example, it’s good to have scout bees that do more searching for nutrition than harvesting it. Scientists attribute the success of insect societies to this division of labor and specialization, which increases efficiency. Some individuals nurse larvae, others are soldiers, and still others remove debris from the nest. Individuals can also change activities as needed. In the nineteenth century Swiss naturalist François Huber found that when the ventilation in a hive was poor and oxygen levels dropped, many bees would stop what they were doing, stand still, and whir their wings to move the air.
Leviton: You say in your book that specialization is only partially a result of instinct. It’s also the result of skills being perfected through experience. For instance, since all workers in a certain species of ants are genetically identical, differences in labor specialization can only be the result of environmental factors.
Chittka: It has been found that some solitary species of bees—and a tiny minority of social bee species—are specialists in visiting just one particular species of flowers, virtually from their emergence from the pupae. There is an advantage to not using lots of your short life visiting dozens of types of flowers, only some of which might be rewarding. Instead you know: If it’s blue and bell-shaped, that’s my job. The disadvantage, of course, is that you’re highly dependent on that single plant species. If, because of climate change or other stresses, that plant comes into bloom a month later than usual or disappears from your flight range entirely, you’re stuck.
Leviton: Can you tell me about the bee who “changed her mind”?
Chittka: This was the bumblebee worker I mentioned before, whom we followed for 156 foraging trips over thirteen days. She had familiarized herself with two foraging patches: one she discovered during an early flight, and another, better, one she found the next day. She spent a good part of several days exploiting the second of these two patches. Then, after a few days of bad weather, during which the bees stayed in the hive, she appeared to suddenly change her mind. Halfway to her usual patch, she flew to the first patch, which she had visited only once, during the very first flight of her life, nine days earlier.
The remarkable thing was that she did this without flying home and leaving again so she could take the original route she’d flown to find this patch. Instead she went straight to it from a different location. This raises the question of whether bees can use a cognitive map to compute new shortcuts between locations.
My former supervisor Randolf Menzel did a number of field tests in the 2000s. To test the bees’ navigational abilities, Menzel interfered with their circadian clocks by injecting them with a general anesthetic that put them to sleep for six hours—giving them “jet lag” and interfering with their ability to use the sun’s location for navigation. Predictably the bees made big directional errors at first, but then they figured out how to get home.
Leviton: It seems to me that whenever the subject of animal intelligence comes up, scientists move the goalposts to claim primacy for humans. At one time the fact that humans had language was the dividing line. Then, when it was shown that some animals also used language, the discussion moved to the use of tools. When we learned that many species use tools, it was the number of brain neurons that put humans at the top—until it was discovered that some whales and elephants have more neurons than adult humans.
Chittka: Well, there is something special about humans. I think it’s unlikely there’s going to be another species any- time soon that writes poetry, or manages to get a fire under control, or travels to the moon. But bees do use tools, albeit in ways that are perhaps less sophisticated than we do. It’s interesting, though: If you look at the evolution of humanity’s tool use over hundreds of thousands of years, you’ll find that things like spearheads often remained the same for hundreds of generations. There was no innovation during that long period. So our tool use hasn’t always evolved as fast as we have seen in recent centuries.
We’ve done some experiments on very simple tool use in bees, like a string-pulling task, which in the past has been used to test the intelligence of primates and corvid birds: The bee can see a food morsel, but it’s behind glass. The only way to get it is to pull on a string. Bees can learn this string-pulling task very rapidly, and once one bee has figured it out, the knowledge spreads quickly through the colony.
In another experiment we used little balls that had to be rolled to a particular destination, like a goal. It’s the same as when you put a coin or token into a vending machine: You have to place the object in a particular location, in a particular way, and only then can you get your snack bar. Bees can learn to use these little balls to get rewards. And, again, they can learn this not only by doing but by observation.
We also find that some wasps in the wild use pebbles to tamp down the sand around their hidden nests. So various forms of object manipulation have been observed in insects inside and outside the lab.
In an experiment that’s around two hundred years old, François Huber looked at how honeybees construct wax combs. The combs are marvelous structures, very functional, highly regular and symmetrical—more so than anything else animals build. Bird nests and beaver dams are relatively messy when compared to a honeycomb.
Most of us would think comb making is just instinctual behavior, but when Huber probed the construction process, he found otherwise. Normally bees start at the top, laying the foundation at the ceiling of a hive and then gradually building downward. To observe this process, Huber and his team inserted a glass ceiling into a hive, and the first thing they noticed was that the bees didn’t like using glass as a foundation. So the bees inverted the entire process, starting at the bottom and gradually building upward.
You might say, “Well, it’s still the same process.” But if you had built a robot to perform a similar procedure, that robot would have fallen flat on its face unless you’d instructed it to use the floor as an alternative starting point.
Next, to make it a little harder, Huber inserted both a glass ceiling and a glass floor. So the bees started building on one of the side walls and progressed laterally through the cavity. When the bees were about midway through the cavity, Huber’s team put a glass wall on the opposite side, a point the bees would not have reached for several days. And the bees immediately put a ninety-degree corner into the comb, directing it to the nearest wooden wall.
That’s fascinating because the bees didn’t wait until they reached the glass, then try to solve the problem. They foresaw the future outcome and took corrective action beforehand. The bees appeared to realize what would happen if they continued the same activity into the future.
Leviton: Would you say the whole idea of “instinct” needs to be reevaluated?
Chittka: All animals have instincts. We have instincts. We can sometimes control them or suppress them, but we’re not free of them.
And with bees it would be unwise to deny they are, for instance, flower visitors by instinct. They build wax constructions by instinct. But the mistake people make is to assume animals follow their instincts rigidly. Behaviors that were once regarded as fully hardwired can now be seen to have a great deal of flexibility in many animals. There’s no question the famous dance language we discussed earlier is an instinctive behavior displayed by all honeybees. And there are hardwired elements to the dance. But just last year a team of Chinese and American researchers found that young honeybees have to learn the dance to some extent. If they are entirely deprived of the opportunity to observe dances as they grow up, they still will display their own dances, but they’re very messy and imprecise, with mistakes in direction and distance. So although some of this behavior is innate, in many ways learning and instinct go hand in hand. You need both for the full, refined behavior.
Leviton: One of the most powerful sections of The Mind of a Bee involves insects demonstrating consciousness of their selves and of their decision-making process.
Chittka: To examine whether an animal is conscious, we look for a number of things. One is the ability to feel something, as opposed to a robot-like creature with no sentience. Another key ingredient is the ability to think, to solve problems in one’s mind, to retrieve past memories, and to plan for the future. But there’s also an appreciation of what you know and what you don’t know. This is what cognition scientists call metacognition.
We often train bees to recognize one color or one visual pattern. They get a sugar reward if they get it right, and sometimes they get a penalty when they’re wrong—we give them a bitter quinine solution that they don’t like. Then we show them the previous pattern they’ve been rewarded for, plus an alternative, which can be either similar or distinct. If you train bees to respond to blue and then present them with a choice of blue or yellow, any bee can get a reward for “pointing” to the blue. But if you give them two shades of blue, it’s harder for them to tell the original blue. In some cases, especially if there’s a risk of a penalty, they won’t make a choice. They seem to be thinking, I’m not sure I’m going to pick the right one, and if I guess wrong, I’ll get the bitter stuff, so I’ll fly away and come back later. That’s metacognition.
We know from the current debate about artificial intelligence that it’s very difficult to say what constitutes consciousness. There’s no single, definitive proof. We animal-consciousness researchers talk of probabilities rather than certainty. We test animals on multiple different thinking tasks: Do they appear to appreciate what other animals think or know? Do they plan for the future? Can they recognize themselves in a mirror? Then we see if it all adds up to a probability that this animal is self-aware.
Leviton: This has big moral implications for how humans interact with animals. I have no compunction about swatting a fly or smashing a mosquito, but I might feel very different if I found out they felt pain like dogs and cats clearly do.
Chittka: To the extent that we recognize a creature is sentient, I think there is a moral obligation to avoid making it suffer. This is common sense when we’re talking about our pets. If a dog injures a paw on broken glass, it will vocalize, it will grimace, it will protect the paw, it will try to avoid broken glass in the future. All these things added together make it very likely the dog has a subjective experience of suffering. Most of us won’t need much convincing of that.
But we cannot talk to dogs or cats or fish or bees. All we can do is collect evidence pointing in the direction that an animal feels something. Scientists, of course, can also track hormonal responses. We can investigate whether the animal has receptors that register tissue damage. People used to say insects don’t have such receptors, but a few decades ago we learned they all do. That doesn’t necessarily mean they have a subjective experience of ouch-like pain. We have to look at the other indicators too. Does the animal respond to an injury? It used to be thought that insects did not notice injuries, but our work has shown they do pay attention to and groom an area where, for instance, they have briefly been stimulated with a heat probe. We don’t injure them, but it’s a mildly unpleasant stimulus, and they do immediately “rub it better,” so to speak.
That alone, however, is not evidence of pain. Another hallmark is flexibility in responding to a noxious or painful stimulus. In other words, if there’s something precious to be had as a result of the pain, we humans can choose to suppress the pain response. We can flexibly prioritize an unpleasant experience and a good one.
Leviton: “No pain, no gain.”
Chittka: Yes. And we’ve found this behavior of suppressing the pain response in bees as well. We’ve already talked of how guard honeybees release a pheromone that makes them ignore battle injuries. The Argentine bee researcher Josué Núñez has shown that guard bees become what might be called “fearless suicidal attackers” under the influence of this chemical release. Tom Ings, in his postdoctoral work on my team, discovered that bees who have previously been attacked by crab spiders exhibit sophisticated, long-term behavioral changes that are in line with the psychological effects of an unpleasant experience on humans. Bees learn to avoid future attacks based on previous “trauma.”
I’m not an animal-rights activist. I’m not asking you to change your gait to avoid ever stepping on an ant. But the precautionary principle suggests we at least shouldn’t cause an animal suffering when we can avoid it. When I was young, some parents would encourage kids to play a game that involved using a magnifying glass to set ants on fire. Even if there’s no formal proof of ants feeling pain, I think the evidence indicates people shouldn’t do things like that for fun.
Leviton: I can remember being six or seven years old, and at the urging of a friend who thought it was cool, pouring salt on snails, which made them bubble up and die. I still feel some guilt about that.
Chittka: Most people did such things. I used to fish as a kid, which involved both hooking grasshoppers and pulling the fish out of the water by its mouth and killing it. We acted on the evidence we had at the time.
We must recognize that many of the animals around us are likely sentient—and thus quite possibly capable of experiencing the deterioration of their habitats. This creates a responsibility for us to do something about it.
Leviton: Who pays for all this research into the lives of bees? Does somebody fund it out of the sheer love of learning, or is there some practical application that makes it a good investment?
Chittka: A lot of the work in my lab costs almost no money. The string-pulling and ball-rolling experiments, for example, require a bit of plywood, some artificial flowers, and some motivated bees. My team has a very playful approach, where the emphasis is on ideas, not so much on technology. Many of us, myself included, will complain about the difficulty of getting funding, because there’s not much to go around and there’s a lot of competition, but we are a bit like cockroaches, in that we’re almost unkillable. Even if you deprive us of all our funding, we will always get something going. [Laughs.] I think a healthy ingredient of any well-functioning society is some “blue skies” research —purely motivated by curiosity.
Of course, you never know what your results might be good for. Many scientific discoveries were made because someone was curious, and the applications emerged much later. Curiosity is perhaps an even stronger motivator than monetary incentives—at least, for some of us.
Leviton: What about the “colony collapse disorder” we hear so much about in the media? Has that brought more attention to your field?
Chittka: I have mixed feelings about that. Colony collapse affects the honeybee, the one species of bee that is not under threat and also is not native to North America, nor to anywhere in the Americas. Honeybees were imported with European settlers who wanted honey. We call them a “livestock species,” because we raise them and look after them. They are one species we don’t have to worry about disappearing.
It’s hard work to keep bee colonies healthy, and when colonies die on a grand scale, it almost invariably happens to ones owned by extremely large commercial beekeeping companies that keep hundreds or thousands of hives. You may not know that millions of bees are shipped to central California every spring for the “almond pollination event.” Eighty percent of all the world’s almonds are grown there, and, to enable this, a large percentage of the honeybees in North America are packed up, loaded on trucks, shipped there, and then shipped back. Of course, these are terrible beekeeping practices. The bees are locked up in the hives for several days while they’re transported. Bees from one colony are often blended with other colonies, and the cramped conditions mean there’s a lot of opportunity for disease transmission. The people who organize this get everything wrong you could possibly get wrong. It’s no wonder some bee colonies don’t survive.
Leviton: You have said we are witnessing a Copernican revolution when it comes to understanding the minds of animals, and that paying attention to their extraordinary abilities might provide some clues about how to deal with the ecological crisis we humans are also undergoing. How so?
Chittka: For me, understanding the minds of bees and other animals inspires a new respect for nature. Many conservation efforts—and there are a lot of people trying to rescue what’s left of the natural world—are motivated by the utility of these animals. This is especially the case with bees and insects. Many people are aware that bees are in trouble and that we ought to do something to help them, because they pollinate our crops. Many fruits and vegetables depend on bees’ pollination services: for example, melons, tomatoes, raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, zucchini, pumpkins, cherries, cucumbers, squash, apples, and citrus fruits.
But that approach can’t work overall. If you’re really trying to protect nature, then it’s a complete package with many species, including annoying ones like wasps. So in addition to the utility argument, we must recognize that many of the animals around us are likely sentient—and thus quite possibly capable of experiencing the deterioration of their habitats. This creates a responsibility for us to do something about it.
With most conservation efforts, all we can do is donate money to the cause, but in the case of bees the beautiful part is that almost everyone can do something to supply the resources they might have difficulty finding: nectar and pollen-rich flowers. You don’t even need a garden. Some flowerpots on a balcony can make a difference.
How many hours a month do people spend grooming their meticulously maintained lawns? A lawn for a bee is a desert. And aren’t lawns a little dull? Letting flowers grow wild actually looks nicer and benefits bees and other insects.
Leviton: In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries lawns became popular with the wealthy elite because they showed the property owner was so rich, he didn’t have to cultivate that land for food.
Chittka: Having a diverse and flowery meadow around your house is a different kind of wealth.
Leviton: In 2016 you launched the London Pollinator Project, encouraging people to plant pollinator-friendly plants like English lavender, viper’s bugloss, and spiked speedwell.
Chittka: Those are local plants appropriate for London, but every area has its own plant species that attract pollinators. Many typical garden flowers bred to please the human eye are perfectly useless to pollinators. You’ll want to find varieties that are native to your area. Just look around at local gardens and observe where the most bee activity is, then put in similar plants yourself. You’ll be doing your part to protect bees.
© The Sun Magazine, March 2025, by Mark Leviton