Are Honey Bees Conscious?
Bees Thinking About Thinking
Many think consciousness to be a unique attribute of human cognition (1). It is part of what defines us as human. Our language skills are unique in the animal world, and consciousness appears as a voiceless conversation that takes place in our heads. But non-human animals can communicate and solve hard problems without a complex language…so maybe they can be conscious as well.
Can you solve a differential equation? Do you know what city is the capitol of South Dakota? These are questions that only you know the answer to. They are questions that test your awareness of your own cognitive ability and memory. The ability to monitor and assess one’s own cognitive faculty is called metacognition—it is thinking about thinking. Many think metacognition is an indicator of consciousness. Researchers have observed metacognition in humans, nonhuman primates, dolphins, dogs, and rats. And now they have found it in honey bees.
Metacognition serves a useful purpose. Sometimes, a task has a reward if successful and a cost if not. Weighing the cost-benefit versus the uncertainty of success allows intelligent animals to either avoid a costly failure and perhaps postpone a task until more knowledge or skill is available. Metacognition increases the overall success rate of learned tasks.
Researchers presented honey bees with a series of increasingly arduous tasks (2). Each task provided a sucrose solution reward if successful and quinine hydrochloride dihydrate solution as punishment if unsuccessful (3). Researchers also provided a third option: to opt out of the test. The results showed the bee was more likely to opt out as the tasks became more difficult. The evidence suggests that the bees had an awareness of their own capabilities and could determine if the juice was worth the squeeze.
Metacognition is also apparent when a honey bee becomes lost or forages for food. She flies in a pattern that randomly searches a local area for a visual landmark (or food) but, after a while, she flies off to search a more remote area (4). It is as if she is thinking, “Well, I’m not finding anything here, so I might as well look in some other place.” This requires a recognition or awareness that one’s own strategy is not working and that a different strategy is called for.
Levy walk or Levy flight is an optimal search strategy observed in albatrosses, amoebas, deer, jackals, monkeys, sharks, bees, and other foraging animals. It is a strategy used to forage and to find familiar landmarks when lost.
If honey bees are conscious, then most likely a lot of other animals are conscious as well. Our last common ancestor with the honey bee goes back over 500 million years ago. That implies one of two things:
Either humans and honey bees (and lot of other animals) inherited consciousness from bilaterians 500 million years ago OR
Consciousness, like the eye, has naturally evolved more than once (5) because of a common survival benefit…and so it is likely to develop in other animals as well.
This suggests that consciousness is not a binary attribute but a spectrum. The greatest difference between humans and non-humans might be a matter of scale, not structure. If that is the case, then the simplest path to understanding human consciousness and cognition might be to study honey bee cognition first.
(1) Consciousness means different things to various philosophers, psychologists, and neurologists. I have written more on this topic at my post The End of Consciousnessism. In this post, I treat consciousness as something more than simple awareness or feelings. For me, consciousness is that voiceless conversation that takes place in my head.
(2) Clint J. Perry, Andrew B. Barron, Uncertainty in honey bees, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nov 2013, 110 (47) 19155-19159; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1314571110
(3) If a honey bee asks you for a cocktail, don’t give her a gin and tonic.
(4) Reynolds AM, Smith AD, Reynolds DR, Carreck NL, Osborne JL. Honeybees perform optimal scale-free searching flights when attempting to locate a food source. J Exp Biol. 2007 Nov;210(Pt 21):3763-70. doi: 10.1242/jeb.009563. PMID: 17951417.
(5) This is called convergent evolution. Eyes may have evolved independently 40 to 65 times in animals because of the benefit that comes from sensing distant objects.
Schwab, I. The evolution of eyes: major steps. The Keeler lecture 2017: centenary of Keeler Ltd. Eye 32, 302–313 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/eye.2017.226
You can find additional reflections on honey bees and cognition at the following posts:
Note: The honey-bee-thinker illustration was delivered by Microsoft Copilot on the first try of “make a drawing of a honey bee posed as the thinker statue”. Total effort from originating the idea to getting a image required $0 and less than one minute. Don’t let your children grow up to be graphic artists.
When we say "does X have property/attribute/ability Y", we implicitly assume that there is a generally accepted test to determine whether this is so. In the case of consciousness, such a generally accepted test is obviously absent.
The most important message in this post is the subscript, “Don’t let your kids grow up to be graphic artists.” The Thinker Bee designed by Microsoft’s Co-Pilot is an excellent example of how technology is changing the workplace. If I had young kids, I’d direct them to skills no computer nor software can duplicate (or learn to code!).