More Reasons to Appreciate Bees in the Garden
Explore their amazing intellect
As a gardener, I’m gradually finding my way toward a new appreciation of insects. When I was learning this craft 50 years ago, I regarded any creature of that sort as a threat, something to be greeted with toxic sprays. I gravitated toward plants advertised as “pest-free.” That generally meant the plant was an import from abroad, one that our native North American insects wouldn’t recognize and use as a food source. But since then I’ve learned the vital role that insects, especially native insects, play in the garden ecosystem. They serve as a food source for birds and other creatures up the food chain, and they are also essential as pollinators.
So I learned to be thankful for insects, but recently I’ve been moving beyond gratitude to admiration. My attitude toward bees, for example, was transformed by a conversation with Dr. Lars Chittka of Queen Mary University of London, the author of a fascinating book: The Mind of a Bee.
Previously I had regarded bees, especially honeybees, as the quintessential example of the hive mind. That is, driven by instinct, the whole hive shares a single consciousness, with all the members functioning as interchangeable cogs in a biological machine. But Dr. Chittka assured me that I could not be more wrong.
He began by pointing out that most bees do not live out their lives in a hive. Indeed, of the 3,600 species of bees native to North America, 90 percent are “solitary,” which means that after mating, the females live alone, raising their offspring by themselves. Even those bees that do coexist in colonies, such as honeybees (a species introduced to North American by European settlers) and our native bumblebees, are quick learners, much quicker in that respect than humans, assimilating an impressive amount of knowledge during a relatively brief lifespan.
Worker honeybees, for example, may live only some six to seven weeks. During that interval they must master tasks around the hive, like helping to construct the combs and packing the cells with honey, and if they survive to mature into field bees, they must also learn how to navigate miles-long trips outside. This involves not only memorizing landmarks so that they can find their way back to the colony, but also how to identify and remember the best sources of pollen and nectar (information that changes hourly as flowers move into and out of bloom) and how to avoid predators, such as the crab spiders that lurk inside flowers waiting to devour bee visitors. Given all these challenges, it’s not surprising that, as Dr. Chittka pointed out, ten percent of all bumblebees never return from their first foraging flight.
Experiments by bee researchers have proven that bees can learn by watching the actions of older, more experienced individuals, or even artificial bees. For example, Olli J. Loukola, one of Dr. Chittka’s colleagues at St. Mary University, used a plastic bee attached to the end of a stick to roll a ball to the center of a platform and unlock a sugary reward. Within five days, bee spectators learned to do this on their own.
Dr. Chittka’s own research has proved that bees can navigate by counting the number of landmarks they pass, and that they do complex calculations to figure out the most efficient route to follow in their visits to different pollen and nectar sources. He also found that individual bees differ in their learning abilities. Some bees in his studies embraced change and new experiences while others were more conservative. Though loath to label this as “personality”—bees are not persons—Dr. Chittka did cite this as evidence of these animals’ psychological complexity.
Dr. Chittka ends The Mind of a Bee with a plea for a new attitude toward these insects. Yes, he says, they are useful to us as pollinators, and given that many species of bees are declining in numbers, that is essential to keep in mind. However, they’re more than just a means to a bigger harvest and ecological health. They have long been proven to be remarkably sophisticated, thinking creatures. Increasingly, evidence is emerging that suggests that bees are sentient, that they have an ability to experience suffering and pleasure.
“From that angle, they do deserve some respect for their strange but nonetheless most likely quite sophisticated minds,” said Dr. Chittka.
We are not, in other words, the only intelligence in the garden.
