I really never expected to spend so much time thinking about bees. They hum around my brain constantly, at least they have been for the past year. More specifically, I had never anticipated that I would spend months designing experiments for creatures the size of my thumbnail, hoping they’d cooperate. But here I am, fresh from the whirlwind of my dissertation, with my mind still buzzing (pun absolutely intended) with everything I learned.
When I first started on this journey, I knew I wanted to explore animal cognition (how an animals brain works). The way animals think and make decisions has always fascinated me. But insects? They weren’t the first creatures that came to mind when I imagined thinking animals. That all changed when I stumbled across research suggesting that bees—yes, tiny, fuzzy, flower-loving bees—are capable of learning, problem-solving, and even counting. Before I knew it, I was hooked and my curiosity took me down a rabbit hole of research. I quickly signed myself up for a dissertation that involved testing the cognitive abilities of bumblebees and honeybees.
Setting the Stage: Welcome to the Bee Lab
Unlike some students who spent their research time in temperature-controlled labs, controlled environment, with meticulous controls, I found myself in the middle of the countryside. Can you imagine spending hours at a time crouched in front of two buzzing hives full of busy bees? It was a little nerve wrecking to begin with, and I have to admit the first time a bee snuck into my net helmet I freaked. But the longer I spent around the bees the more comfortable I felt, and soon I was even ditching the cumbersome protective gear. The bees didn’t mind me and I didn’t mind them, and throughout my months of study I didn’t get stung once!
My bees were housed on a UK farm, surrounded by fields of wildflowers, crops, and a whole lot of unpredictability. The first challenge? Getting the bees to actually participate. You can’t exactly hand them a questionnaire or politely ask them to complete a task. Instead, I had to get creative, designing small Y-mazes and nectar rewards in my tasks to encourage them to show off their intelligence. The plan was simple: I’d test them on spatial navigation, quantity discrimination (yes, bees can count!), and inhibitory control (moving away from a reward in order to solve a problem) to see how their cognitive skills compared.
What I didn’t account for? The sheer stubbornness of bees. Some simply refused to enter my carefully designed mazes, others seemed more interested in wandering off to explore the real flowers, and on particularly frustrating days, I felt like they were just mocking me by sitting still and watching me trying to coax them from their hive.
The Y-maze I created for my bees!
Lessons from the Hive: Patience, Perseverance, and Pollinators
One of the biggest lessons I had to learn throughout the process was patience. Bees operate on their own schedule, not mine. Some days, testing went smoothly with tiny successes that felt monumental. On other and colder days, I watched in despair as my buzzing subjects completely ignored the artificial landmarks I had carefully placed for them.
Still the wait was worth it for the moments of pure magic. Seeing a bumblebee navigate a complex detour, proving that they could problem-solve. Watching a honeybee choose the larger quantity of flowers, showing a glimmer of numerical understanding. It was in these moments that I realized I wasn’t just testing bees, I was witnessing cognitive competence of an under researched species in action.
Unexpected Challenges (and a Few Surprises)
Of course, no dissertation is without its hurdles and neither was mine. Aside from the occasional stubborn bee, I also had to deal with unpredictable weather (bees don’t like flying in the rain), unexpected hive disturbances, and the unshakable feeling that the bees were always one step ahead of me. You truly have never been humbled until you have been outsmarted by a bee. At one point, I discovered that my bumblebees had mites, a setback that made me question how their health might be affecting their decision-making. Did the presence of mites slow their cognitive responses? Were they too focused on survival to engage with my experiments? These were the kinds of unexpected variables that made me rethink my approach to research. Regardless, there was unfortunate little I could do to stop the mite issue and I had to persevere with the setback.
What My Bees Taught Me
Looking back, my dissertation was more than just an academic project, it was a journey into the underestimated minds of insects and into my own self-reflection. It changed the way I see animal minds. For so long, we’ve placed animals on a hierarchy, assuming that big brains equal big thoughts. But my bees proved otherwise. With their tiny neural circuits, they navigated complex tasks, made decisions, and adapted to new challenges.
More than that, they taught me to slow down, to observe, and to appreciate the small but remarkable ways in which nature operates. They taught me to stop thinking of myself as on some sort of pedestal and appreciate that I can learn from unexpected places.
So, if you ever find yourself watching a bee lazily drifting from flower to flower, take a moment to appreciate that this tiny creature might just be making a tactical decision. And if you ever decide to test their brains? Be prepared to be outsmarted.
Love from,
An Earth Nerd
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