Some of the earliest research investigating how insects sense and process information was done on honeybees. The book that inspired our scientific research, Charles Butler's The Feminine Monarchie, is a classic example of the interest and passion that honeybees have inspired for centuries. While our contribution to Bee-ing Human still researches bees, we focussed on bumblebees not honeybees. To understand why I here outline the advantages of working with bumblebees and the history of research on honeybees and bumblebees.
Honeybees have been fascinating insects to study and researchers (and beekeepers) have learnt a great deal about the abilities of bees including about their vision, olfaction, floral choice, learning, memory, communication and social behaviour. More recently, however, researchers in comparative cognition have focussed on another group of bees — the bumblebees. In comparative cognition, researchers typically want to compare information processing abilities across different animals and understand the mechanisms, abilities and limitations of different animals. This gives them valuable information on the ecological and evolutionary origins of multiple aspects of cognition, including learning, decision-making and culture. How do animals differ? Why do some animals have certain abilities but others not?
Bumblebees have much smaller colonies than honeybees, making them useful insects that can be studied both in laboratory experiments and in the wild. Like honeybees, they are expert and enthusiastic foragers, that learn the visual properties of and smells of rewarding flowers as well as their locations. They also must adapt to different flower morphologies and develop suitable motor skills and handling strategies. We know a lot about their natural history, e.g., their life history, what cues they pay attention to, how chemicals in nectar affect them, their navigational skills and when their cognition leads to better survival. This allows researchers to understand their behaviour in the context of their ecology and the impact they can have on flowers and environments.
The life strategy of bumblebees means that they are behaviourally flexible, even more so than honeybees. As a result, they have been successfully trained to learn a variety of different stimuli and researchers have been able to gain insights into their cognition. Researchers have asked questions about how they recognise patterns, whether they can understand concepts, how they process numerical data, how they learn from each other and even if they have the capacity for culture. They have become a fascinating animal for studies that investigate how seemingly complex behaviour can be generated, albeit not always in the way you might expect.
Most recently, bumblebees have become key insects in which people have studied aspects of emotion. When given an unexpected reward, bumblebees are faster and more likely to approach ambiguous colours, which, it has been suggested, resemble an optimistic bias. This is akin to interpreting a glass as half-full. Conversely, when they experience the stress of a simulated predatory attack, bumblebees interpret an ambiguous colour negatively and potentially have lowered expectations of high rewards. This resembles a pessimistic bias. These findings have opened the door to thinking about bees as having states resembling emotions. There is, however, a lot more to discover about what these states are like and the consequences they have for their social interactions and foraging strategies. Charles Butler's approach of close observation of bees and their interactions inspired us to begin to ask these questions in our project, building on what we already know about bumblebees, their natural behaviour and their emotions.