What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories, and Personalities of Bees

By Stephen L. Buchmann

For many of us, the buzzing of a bee elicits panic. But the next time you hear that low droning sound, look closer: the bee has navigated to this particular spot for a reason using a fascinating set of tools. She may be using her sensitive olfactory organs, which provide a 3D scent map of her surroundings. She may be following visual landmarks or instructions relayed by a hive-mate. She may even be tracking electrostatic traces left on flowers by other bees. What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories, and Personalities of Bees invites us to follow bees’ mysterious paths and experience their alien world.
Although their brains are incredibly small—just one million neurons compared to humans’ 100 billion—bees have remarkable abilities to navigate, learn, communicate, and remember. In What a Bee Knows, entomologist Stephen Buchmann explores a bee’s way of seeing the world and introduces the scientists who make the journey possible. We travel into the field and to the laboratories of noted bee biologists who have spent their careers digging into the questions most of us never thought to ask (for example: Do bees dream? And if so, why?). With each discovery, Buchmann’s insatiable curiosity and sense of wonder is infectious.
What a Bee Knows will challenge your idea of a bee’s place in the world—and perhaps our own. This lively journey into a bee’s mind reminds us that the world is more complex than our senses can tell us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Mar 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781642831252

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What a Bee Knows

Exploring the Thoughts, Memories, and Personalities of Bees

Stephen Buchmann

Washington

Covelo

© 2023 Stephen L. Buchmann

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319.

Library of Congress Control Number 2022946104

All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Keywords: angiosperms, animal communication, animal intelligence, arthropods, bee, beehive, beeswax, bumblebees, cognition, consciousness, cuckoo bees, Charles Darwin, dreaming, emotions, eusocial, flowering plants, foraging, hearing, honey, honey bees, honeycomb, Hymenoptera, learning, magnetoreception, memory, mosaic vision, mutualism, navigation, nectar, neurons, pain, pollen, pollinators, self-awareness, sentience, sexual selection, sleep, smell, social bees, social brain, solitary bees, sun compass, superorganisms, taste, tool use, UV vision, vulture bees, waggle dance

ISBN-13: 978-1-64283-125-2 (electronic)

Dedicated to my entomological mentors:

Phillip A. Adams (CSUF), John Alcock (ASU),

Earle Gorton Linsley (UCB), and Robbin W. Thorp (UCD)

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1. A Bee’s Life

Chapter 2. The Remarkable Bee Brain

Chapter 3. Bees Living Together

Chapter 4. What Bees Sense and Perceive

Chapter 5. Bees and Flowers: Love Story or Arms Race?

Chapter 6. Finding Many Lovers

Chapter 7. Bee Smart

Chapter 8. Master Builders and Memory

Chapter 9. Sleep and Dreaming in Bees

Chapter 10. What Do Bees Feel?

Chapter 11. Self-Awareness, Consciousness, and Cognition

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Appendix. What We Can All Do to Help Pollinators and Their Plants

Notes

Art Credits

Index

About the Author

Preface

The sight and sound of a bumblebee or a honey bee buzzing from flower to flower in an alpine meadow or a roadside planting is calming to many, yet it invokes outright panic in others. This happens frequently in Western cultures, where we usually reach for a spray can of insecticide or swat at any flying insect rather than pause to admire its beauty or reflect upon its captivating and intelligent behaviors. We delight in the viscous sweetness of honey on the palate, direct from the jar or slathered across a piece of toast. We savor the distinctive and flavorful honeys ripened from floral nectars but don’t care for confronting the winged honey makers.

Do you remember the last time you took a break and watched the passing escapades of a brightly colored bee, wasp, or butterfly? In the West, entomophobia—trepidation and anxiety around insects—is well developed, perhaps as strong as our apparently inborn dread of venomous snakes. We’re convinced that every bee is hell-bent on stinging us and that a single sting will be lethal. Not surprisingly, these largely unwarranted fears and irrational phobias support a thriving global pest control industry based upon deadly yet nonspecific chemicals.

In the United States, there are at least 28,000 mostly sole-proprietorship pest control businesses employing more than 137,000 people, a rapidly growing industry valued at $17 billion annually.¹ Over 1 billion pounds of insecticides are used in the United States each year. This is almost three times the amount of neuroactive chemicals (350 million pounds, including 63 million pounds of DDT) that were applied during 1962, the year Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, her revolutionary environmental science book.² Apparently, we haven’t changed our actions or our ever-increasing chemical assaults against pollinating insects, and indirectly against ourselves, in the six decades since Carson’s prescient warning.

In my scientific travels, I’ve noticed strong cultural contrasts in people’s attitudes toward insects, especially toward aculeates, those insects—such as ants, bees, and wasps—that bear a defensive stinger capable of delivering potent and painful venom. In many Asian cultures, there is more appreciation of bees and other insects in art, poetry, and everyday life than in the United States. In Japan and China, for more than a thousand years, various cricket species have been kept as pets in bamboo or molded gourd cages.³ These pets are revered for the repetitive chirps of their mate-calling songs. The Chinese also have a long tradition of gambling on the outcome of cricket fights. The insect gladiators are kept in special cages, cared for, and fed special, often secret, diets or allowed to engage in sexual congress before a bout. The latter is thought to enhance their fighting skills. In America, a cricket on the hearth is more likely to elicit a shoe thrown at the little songster.

I ask you to consider bees in a different way, perhaps for the very first time in your life. Come along with me on a global journey of discovery, shock, and awe into the minds and lives of bees. Give bees a chance. Discover them for yourself, examining their ways, their senses, how they learn, remember, think, and decide. Along the way, I hope your fight-or-flight reaction to a flying bee will change once you know bees a little better and that you may appreciate their engaging behaviors as much as I do.

Around the world live some twenty-one thousand distinctly different species of bees.⁴ They are typically solitary females digging their own nest tunnels in the ground or in dead wood without any help. Others are truly social, living among tens of thousands of their sisters and hive mates and their queen mother. Whether social or solitary, bees are individuals. They have distinct personalities. They learn and memorize important details of their world.

Bees also have a time sense and return to the same flowers at just the right time when the flowers are actively producing nectar. Most bees find their flowers, or other bee larvae as prey, by individual initiative. Others use chemical signposts or an elaborate waggle dance to recruit nestmates, informing them about the direction and distance to rewarding patches of flowers.

Most bees are gentle vegans, subsisting upon the pollen and nectar made by flowering plants. Certain cuckoo bees sneak their eggs into the open brood cells of unrelated bees. Upon hatching, their larvae stab and kill the host bees’ eggs or young larvae with their ice tong–like jaws. A few kinds, the vulture bees from Panama and Brazil, make their living by locating vertebrate carrion, ingesting it, and turning those carcasses into a substance similar to royal jelly to feed their young.⁵

Where did this incredible diversity begin? About 130 million years ago, the world’s earliest known bee evolved from its wasp ancestors, which likely hunted tiny insects called thrips.⁶ One example of this earliest bee was found nicely preserved in golden amber, fossilized plant resin, from Myanmar (Burma). Flowering plants evolved a bit earlier, around 140 million years ago. These earliest angiosperms were likely first pollinated by flies and beetles. But with the evolution of bees and their transition to herbivory, bees started to nearly exclusively visit flowers for their food. By the Eocene epoch, some 56–34 million years ago, bees were mostly highly faithful and dependable visitors of the world’s flowering plants.

From this humble beginning, the long and important relationship between bees and flowers has developed. Usually, we consider them to be mutualists, with each one helping the other. Flowers are living billboards, displaying their beguiling scents and colors as advertisements for sexual favors. More than that, flowers are unabashedly plant genitals exposed on a stem for all to see. Your expensive florist’s bouquet should be X-rated. Stalked anthers house thousands of pollen grains, themselves containers for gametes, the male sex cells of flowering plants. Think of pollen as plant sperm cells. Centrally placed in most flowers is the style, with its sticky receptive end. This is where pollen grains land, sending their pollen tubes and gametes down into the heart of the flower to fuse and fertilize its ovules, like tiny peas inside their pod. The ovules become seeds within fruits. Although many plants can and do self-pollinate, thereby producing seeds, the best and most favorable genetic solution is for a distant and unrelated plant to father the seeds of a mother plant. This gives them the best chance of passing along their genes to healthy, fit offspring.

This is where bees and other vagile, or mobile, pollinators come into play. They can fly and plants cannot. They do the plants’ traveling for them. Think of bees as travel agents on scouting missions. About 85 percent of the world’s approximately 369,000 species of angiosperms (flowering plants) rely upon animal pollinators, their sexual go-betweens.⁷ In temperate zone regions, bees pollinate about 80 percent of flowering plants. Rooted and immobile—except for leaf and stem movements or their fruits or seeds hitching a ride upon or inside birds, mammals, and even one type of seed-dispersing bee—plants don’t get around much. To go on a date, a flower must either be a prom corsage or enlist surrogate aid from the wings and legs of a passing bee. Tiny desert bees might fly only 50 meters (about 150 feet) from their nest to a flower. Other bees might travel vastly greater distances, 3.2–6.4 kilometers (2–4 miles) or even 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) in the case of a honey bee.⁸ Bees can move pollen over great distances.

Bees aren’t purposefully doing favors by moving flowering plant sex cells around. No, bees visit flowers for their own purely selfish reasons. Pollen and nectar are floral rewards that bring bees to flowers and hold their attention. Bees collect pollen and nectar as food for themselves and their immature brood, their blind, grublike larvae within carefully formed underground brood cells. Bees’ daily hunt for food is a life-and-death matter. Depending on floral resources and the weather, a bee might pollinate as many as ten thousand flowers in a day.

Because of the branched hairs on their fuzzy bodies, the oily, sticky pollen grains, and often a little help from electrostatics, when bees brush against anthers, pollen sticks to them. Pollen grains also lodge in safe sites where bees can’t remove them—just as we can’t easily scratch between our shoulder blades. This tiny fraction of unreachable pollen grains that isn’t brought home and eaten by the bees makes possible the pollination of wild plants and crops alike. When bees move from flower to flower, they accidentally deposit viable pollen grains onto floral stigmas. Later, fertilization occurs, and seeds ripen inside fruits.

This is indeed a lucky accident for fruit- and seed-eating wild animals and for humans. We should thank bees and other pollinators for every third bite, about 35 percent, of the world’s food supply that isn’t derived from wind-pollinated cereal crops.⁹ Through the food gathering and pollination accidents of bees and other pollinators, the world’s most nutritious and tastiest fruits and vegetables are brought to the tables of the world’s 8 billion people. Indirectly, bees keep us well-fed. Rice, corn, and wheat are okay, but personally I prefer to eat the myriad colorful and nutrient-dense plant foods brought to us on the wings of bees. Annually, the value of these pollination services, mostly due to bees, is $235–$577 billion globally and $6–$14 billion in the United States.¹⁰ We truly need to be thankful to bees for our bountiful harvests.

Bees prefer flowers that are blue or yellow and have sweet scents, which offer nectar containing 30–50 percent sugar.¹¹ Think your child has a sweet tooth? Not compared with bees. Coca-Cola Classic is only 10 percent sugar and 90 percent water. Bees are sugar junkies. Nectar fuels bees’ flight and warms them, allowing them to rev up their thoracic flight motors preflight and enabling a queen bumblebee to incubate her brood just like a mother hen.

But as we will discover, flowering plants and bees are not strict mutualists. Flowering plants don’t want to give up all their precious pollen to undesirable pollinators or even to generally dependable pollinating bees. A small fraction of a flower’s pollen grains must make their way to other flowers to ultimately produce seeds and foster new generations of plants. Bees, on the other hand, would like to collect all the pollen and not give any of it up. This leads to cheaters in the system. Some nectar-robbing bees cut slits or holes at the bases of tubular flowers and never deposit pollen on stigmas. They are anti-pollinators. Orchids and a few other flowering plants offer no food to bee pollinators. Instead, they dupe male bees into thinking a particular orchid flower is a receptive, ready, and waiting female of their species. Why not? They produce the same chemical scents and even sort of look like those female bees—at least to the eyes of a myopic male bee.

This trick works because bees have developed a diverse and intriguing array of adaptations when it comes to sex. Together, we’ll explore their interesting and mostly hidden sex lives. Many male bees are highly territorial and defend clumps of flowers from other males. There, they hope to mate with a female of their species. Carpenter bees in Arizona seek out prominent hilltops. In small groups, they display their presence by releasing a rose-scented sex pheromone. Females follow the scent uphill and decide which male to mate with. This is called a lek mating system, just like those in some birds.¹² Honey bee drones fly high above the ground in drone congregation areas, following the scent of virgin queens, with which they mate in midair.¹³ Certain desert bees in the genus Centris have two types of males. Larger males are diggers and warriors. These so-called metanders can smell virgin females waiting underground. After battling with other metanders, digger males excavate their partners and fly them to a nearby bush on which to mate. Smaller males adopt a less successful strategy of patrolling nearby plants in search of potential mates.¹⁴

Most remarkably, we now know that bees are sentient, they may exhibit self-awareness, and they possibly have a basic form of consciousness. Bees can feel pain and likely suffer. Some bees plan for the future by cutting resin mines into fresh bark, to which they return again and again. Others cut small holes in leaves, causing those plants to flower as much as a month earlier, to the benefit of the bees. They think and may form mental maps of their foraging routes. Bees remember the characteristic scents and shapes of their preferred flowers for several days. They make choices and can be easily trained to select and remember various colors or odors. They can navigate complex mazes and intuit other challenges as swiftly and efficiently as any rat or mouse. When presented with certain flowers, many bees innately know to use their powerful flight muscles to vibrate pored anthers, instantly releasing protein-rich pollen, which will be inaccessible to other bees or pollinators.

Bees can also learn to do highly unusual things such as pulling a string or rolling a ball to receive a sugar water reward. Maybe you’ve seen that YouTube video of bumblebees playing soccer.¹⁵ These are tasks they would never do in nature, but they might be surprising from a creature with a tiny brain housing just one million neurons (humans have at least eighty billion). Bees spend a good deal of time sleeping, during which memories are formed and stored in long-term memory just as in us. It may be impossible to ever know, but bees may even dream.

Bees do not perceive the world as we do. Their sensory systems would be entirely alien, and perhaps horrifying, to us if we could for but a moment jump inside their skins and experience their world. What would it be like to see polarized light patterns in the sky, or to see the invisible ultraviolet light patterns on flower petals, or to see electrostatic patterns left on flowers from earlier bee visits? What if we couldn’t see flowers unless we were a few inches from them? A bee’s vision is sixty times less sharp than our own. On the other hand, bees detect the microscopic textures and patterns on flower petals, much as a blind person can read the tiny bumps in a printed Braille book.

Humans have been associated with bees and cared for them for millennia. By 3000 BCE, Old Kingdom Egyptians were keeping honey bees.¹⁶ Egyptian beekeepers navigated papyrus-and-wood barges up and down the Nile River containing mobile apiaries of honey bees in ceramic hives. They effectively followed the onshore bloom, and their bees made bountiful crops of honey. These were the world’s first migratory beekeepers. Atop the porous limestone of tropical forests in the southern Mexican states of Yucatán and Quintana Roo live social bees and their keepers. The ancient Maya tended these stingless Melipona bees, especially the royal or lady bee, as do the modern Maya.¹⁷ Here, highly social colonies of bees living inside log hives called jobones have been carefully tended for almost four thousand years. These stingless bees affix reflective white sand to their nest entrances as ultraviolet signposts to guide them home in their deeply shaded forests. Melipona worker bees also communicate with their nestmates using brief buzzes, sound pulses about floral resources.

Following in the footsteps of naturalists and scientists of the past, we’ll go into the field to locations around the world and into the laboratories of noted bee biologists and pollination ecologists. You’ll be introduced to the observations and experiments of innovative scientists who have unraveled the mysteries of bee vision, olfaction, taste, touch, learning, and memory, and bees’ astounding mental abilities.

My own first encounters with bees were as a high school student in Placentia, California, in the late 1960s. One important lesson learned was to work my honey bee hives only on sunny days and with proper personal protective equipment. Using a crowbar to tear into the walls of an old shed to remove honeycombs from a feral colony did not go well. The morning was a dreary gray, and a light drizzle had begun to fall, which I mistakenly hoped would mean a cooler, more relaxing experience. In painful hindsight, it must have been something about wearing trousers that didn’t cover my thin black socks, using a flimsy veil, and the fact that the bad weather had kept the ill-tempered guard bees indoors. They, however, were fully ready to explode, defending their sweet honey stores, as I cracked open the first board. My ankles received more than one hundred stings, swelling to the size of footballs, and they itched for days. I discovered a lot about stimuli and bee behavior that fateful day.

As a college sophomore, a first trip into the Costa Rican dry deciduous forest of Guanacaste Province was my personal adventure, my biological Voyage of the Beagle. Later, I became a professional pollination ecologist with graduate degrees from California State University, Fullerton, and the University of California, Davis. Today, as a faculty member of the University of Arizona, I continue my research into buzz pollination, oil-collecting bees, and, most recently, the microbiomes living inside bees’ brood cells. It turns out that many solitary bees are getting as much nutrition, or more, by consuming microbes as by eating pollen. Every day spent in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona and Mexico presents unique opportunities to explore the minds and behaviors of bees. It is highly pleasurable and enlightening to watch bees interact with desert blooms and to mentor University of Arizona students and interact with faculty colleagues around the world.

I’ve trained bees to visit artificial and real flowers within indoor flight arenas. I’ve pointed a shotgun microphone at bees while they buzz pollinated roadside nightshade flowers in southeastern Arizona, and then analyzed their buzzes in terms of frequency, duration, and amplitude. I’ve watched bees stick out their tongues at me (the widely used proboscis extension response test) as my colleagues and I puffed test flower scents at them. In every possible way, my life has been a wonderful and fascinating journey into the private lives of bees while discovering some of their innermost mysteries.

We’ll now begin our journey of discovery into the minds, sensations, and experiences of bees both familiar and strange. Along the way, we’ll meet foraging, nesting, mating, and thinking bees of all types. Let’s fly with them.

Chapter 1

A Bee’s Life

The fuzzy brown bee awakens inside a dark underground burrow. She’s completed her nest, a den of open urn-shaped brood cells that will become the precious nurseries for her grublike larvae. She is a single mom with a family to feed. Our bee gets no assistance from her long-dead mate or from her sisters or other relatives. She isn’t part of a social collective, nor does she live within a compact wooden hive bursting with thousands of other bees. Her life is a brief, solitary existence, a few intense weeks spent foraging at flower patches, gathering food and provisions that will ensure her young will mature. Each morning, she flies from her earthen nest to locate distant flowers, which are like one-stop bee supermarkets. Bees need this hidden pollen and nectar, the food rewards that flowers offer in return for pollination services.

It’s a difficult and busy life. Her brain, though no larger than a poppy seed, can handle the complex thoughts and challenging celestial and landmark navigation that daily foraging requires. Every trip to a flower is a new learning experience, and she easily memorizes the flowers’ locations, colors, scents, and rewards. The bee navigates and actively chooses the kinds of flowers she visits, making use of her past experiences and memories. She thinks, makes quick decisions, and learns for herself from her complex and ever-changing interactions with the environment.

On this typical morning, the mother bee scrambles up from the bottom of her deep nest to the soil surface, aided by little kneepads on all six legs. She pauses just below the surface, not daring to show even the tip of one antenna. There are many potential dangers outside the safety of her nest. There may be hungry wolf spiders, lizards, birds, or ferocious predatory insects such as robber flies nearby. Other insects, including parasitic bee flies, velvet ants (a kind of wasp), and parasitic blister beetles, are potent natural enemies waiting to enter a bee’s nest, to lay their own eggs while the owner is away.

She waits several minutes until the rays of the bright morning sun strike her face and warm her. Our female is about to fly. She inches forward and tests the air, both antennae waving frantically like stout fishing rods. Thousands of finely tuned microscopic sensory cells are embedded within each of the ten flexible segments (flagellomeres) of her antennae. Everything seems fine. Her sensory cells and the two mushroom body regions (areas that process complex information) within her brain signal an all clear. She doesn’t see or smell any nearby predator or parasite making a stealthy approach toward her burrow.

The female bee briefly shivers the powerful flight muscles within her thorax to warm up. Ready, she launches herself skyward and hovers in midair. Performing an aerial pirouette, she flies left, then back to the center, and then to the right of her nest. She repeats these back-and-forth, ever-wider zigzags, all while facing her nest and flying higher with each pass. In fact, she is memorizing the locations of the physical landmarks around her nest. These could be small stones, live or dead plants, bits of wood, or similar debris. She quickly creates a mental map of her home terrain. In less than a minute, she has memorized all the visual imagery, the spatial geometry, and the smells of her immediate surroundings. All sorts of solitary and social bees perform this instinctive behavior when leaving their nests, forming detailed mental maps of their homesite and nearby landmarks.¹

Soon, our female turns and flies away from her nest at about 24 kilometers per hour (15 miles per hour) in search of flowers.² Fragrant blooms will provide her with the crucial pollen and nectar resources she needs to survive and provision her underground nursery. While she is foraging, the bee’s compound eyes detect and analyze the plane of polarization of sunlight spreading across the sky, even if the sun is partially hidden behind clouds. She knows the time of day by observing the relative position of the sun as it moves across the sky. This is the so-called sun compass. It is used by bees, ants, and wasps to keep time and navigate within complex spatial environments while walking or flying to and from their nests.³

Once our mother bee locates a promising flower—perhaps one she remembers from previous visits—she probes it for nectar, accidentally brushing against the flower’s plump anthers. She is dusted with gritty microscopic pollen, which contains large amounts of nutritious proteins, fats, vitamins, and minerals. And, like the blades of a Swiss Army knife, her special rake-like leg combs collect pollen from her body to transport home. She packs thousands of the powdery pollen grains onto the branched hairs of her hind legs. Once gathered there, they look like fluffy little orange saddlebags.

Now laden with pollen safely stored on her hind legs, and nectar inside her nectar stomach (the crop), she flies home using celestial cues including the polarization of sunlight and the sun’s position, along with her flight and wind speed. Her flying skills are all performed with a navigational computer inside her brain honed by evolution during millions of generations of ancestral bees before her. Putting on the air brakes at the last second, she searches for those previously memorized landmark cues, the bee signposts like colored airport runway lights guiding her safely back home. It’s quite an accomplishment for a bee only one centimeter (about one-half inch) long to make such long flights to distant fields of flowers.

Back inside her nest, the bee mixes the sweet nectar and pollen using her legs and mouthparts and then shapes a moist pea-size ball of bee bread. Turning away, she lays an egg from the tip of her abdomen, attaching the sausagelike translucent white egg to the food ball. The bee’s egg is smaller than a slender white rice grain. It won’t hatch into a tiny, slender larva for another three days. The pollen ball contains all the meals in one that the mother bee provides for each developing larva. In fact, this is all the food she will provide to each offspring, everything they will require to grow from the egg into an adult bee.

Her work finished, the mother bee will soon die, never seeing or interacting with any of her offspring. Her progeny will be left to survive and defend themselves against destructive fungi, pathogenic microbes, predators, parasites, and the weather. The fat grubs will grow quickly and then transform into pupae. A few lucky grubs will emerge from their underground cells as healthy adults the following spring. These next-generation females will mate, forage, dig and provision nests, then ultimately die, linking endless bee generations that have been repeated over millions of years.

Image: The belowground nest of a typical solitary ground-nesting bee (e.g., Melissodes). Off the main tunnel are side branches leading to larval cells. These brood cells contain pollen-plus-nectar, the food provision, upon which a single egg is laid. The bee larvae develop through four or five molts and eventually pupate. The next generation of bees typically remain underground until they emerge as adults the following spring.

The belowground nest of a typical solitary ground-nesting bee (e.g., Melissodes). Off the main tunnel are side branches leading to larval cells. These brood cells contain pollen-plus-nectar, the food provision, upon which a single egg is laid. The bee larvae develop through four or five molts and eventually pupate. The next generation of bees typically remain underground until they emerge as adults the following spring.

The bee’s life I’ve just described is not unique. In fact, solitary ground- or twig-nesting bees are the rule, not the exception. Honey-making, or social, bees in huge colonies are rare. Digging a nest and foraging at flowers for food are just two of the many behaviors that make bees incredibly fascinating creatures, like alien life-forms right here on planet Earth.

But one must wonder, what do bees and humans share in terms of behaviors, anxiety, and self-awareness? We can still see Aristotle’s lasting influence in some recent writing claiming that humans are unique among animals—that only we can think or reason, make and use tools, form abstract ideas, communicate with language, have self-awareness, dream, grieve lost family members, or contemplate our own mortality. Fortunately, these claims are being overturned as animal behaviorists, ethologists, and comparative psychologists expand their knowledge of the nonhuman world. Today, biologists understand that humans are not completely different from other animals. Especially in relation to cognition, sentience, and learning, we are enmeshed within a broad animal continuum, not better than or