Princeton University Press
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ARE we ready for the radical message that an insect may have a form of consciousness? I am not sure.
Most of The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka, professor of sensory and behavioural ecology at Queen Mary University of London, will upset no one: it is an entrancing journey through the senses and life struggles of bees. The shock comes in the final chapter, when he argues that a bee may have a “mind” that both thinks and feels.
Consciousness used to be seen as uniquely human, but then other mammals, starting with primates, were admitted to the club. Now many consider that an invertebrate, the octopus, may be aware. To include an insect in this consciousness club would be another prodigious leap: from being almost alone, we would find ourselves in a vast sea of sentience.
That is radical and risks inviting ridicule. But the evidence is there, and might force us to rethink our duty towards animals, as Chittka’s afterword explains.
The bulk of the book takes an approach that I loved. A sub-heading in the introduction reads: “Why imagining other minds is important for understanding them.” Chittka continues that some philosophers see “no point in trying to imagine such strange alternative worlds. I disagree…”
Me too. Scientists rightly fear anthropomorphism, but used skilfully, the imagination yields understanding. So let’s accept Chittka’s invitation to “picture what it is like to be a bee”.
First, put on your exoskeleton and enjoy your wings – you can fly all day, faster than a human can run. Your eyes are less sharp now, but respond faster: electric lights flicker rather than glow. You are able to sense Earth’s magnetic field, and can see ultraviolet light and a range of new colours.
Antennae stick out from your head and can be moved around to smell, taste, hear and analyse shapes. The subtlest flower scents are detected so quickly that you can run your antennae over a surface and trace a pattern of perfumes into what Chittka calls an “odour movie”.
But to discover what is on a bee’s “mind”, you must go further, and imagine yourself living a bee’s life, experiencing its challenges.
On day one as a forager, you start by making looping flights near the hive, so that you can recognise home. Fail and you die. Then it is off to work. You must find food sources quickly, remember their location, the best routes to them and the way home. You have to learn when particular flowers make nectar and master new manipulative skills to reach food in different flower shapes.
You will also need to work fast, since you must visit some 1000 flowers, rejecting 5000 others as not worthwhile, and fly 10 kilometres or so to generate a drop of honey. Not easy. Humans struggle to shop thriftily when a few supermarkets offer different bargains at different times – a bee must do far better while putting in 12 to 16-hour shifts.
This “experiment” shows that throughout your foraging life you have to learn fast, solve problems, plan and tap into memories. You need to be smart. A bee isn’t the kit of hard-wired, pre-fabricated “instincts” you might think.
Exploring more of the bee’s cognitive skills, we discover from Chittka that bees can count. Not as humans do, by identifying small numbers at a glance, but by ticking off items sequentially. They can focus their attention and learn rules to classify flower types, and more abstract rules, like “same” or “different”. By watching other bees, they also learn not only which flower types to visit, but the tricks needed to get at the nectar.
A bumblebee can even learn to pull a string to access a sugar source, and another bee can pick up that skill by watching her. This new skill may spread throughout a whole colony, which astonished me. But from the bee’s perspective, such cognitive tricks are just what are needed to survive.
If we accept that bees are smart, can we also consider they might be conscious? This is quite a stretch. It is one thing to imagine a bee’s mind in order to build a picture of its daily life, but quite another to claim that it really has a “mind” that both thinks and feels, that is aware and can potentially suffer.
Chittka knows that he is in speculative territory. No one can prove that a creature is conscious. But the bee has some attributes considered critical for “mind”. For example, “mind” surely requires integrating information from the senses and body into a bigger picture. Bumblebees that have learned to distinguish between two objects by handling them in the dark can recognise them visually, suggesting they make representations of objects that don’t depend on the sense used.
They also appear aware of their own bodies. After carefully examining a narrow gap, a bumblebee can angle its body, or fly sideways, to pass through it. Additionally, bees seem to display metacognition (meaning that they know what they know), have emotional states, feel pain and have different sleep phases.
The list grows, although a bee’s mind may be hard for us to grasp. With their fast senses, bees might differ profoundly from us in their perception of time, for example.
There is much more to Chittka’s argument that must be left for interested readers to discover. The Mind of a Bee is a serious book that requires deep thought. My bet is that a few readers will end up convinced, a few will be indignant and most, like me, will be intrigued and hoping for the birth of a new field of comparative consciousness, in which many such “alien” minds are explored. That would be a fine outcome for a brave book at the frontiers of science.
