Bees are sentient’: inside the stunning brains of nature’s hardest workers

A devastating threat
While untold numbers of bees are killed for scientific research, this pales in comparison with the number that die while pollinating mass-produced crops, particularly almonds. More than 2m colonies – about 70% of commercial honey bee colonies in the US – are trucked to California’s almond groves every February and subjected to the perils of industrialized agriculture, from pesticides to disease, with billions of bees perishingevery year.

But finding a way to mass-produce crops while reducing pain and suffering for bees is a daunting undertaking. If vegetarians and vegans who avoid eating animals for ethical reasons were to apply the same standards to foods pollinated by bees, they would have very little on their plates.

“We can’t produce nutritious food in this country without bees,” says a longtime agricultural entomologist working for the USDA. The scientist asked not to be named for fear of retribution by animal rights activists. While attempts have been made to develop mechanical drones that can pollinate crops and to create self-pollinating plants, nothing comes close to the efficiency of nature’s original technology.

“We need to make sure that everybody has access to optimum nutrition that is affordable,” says the entomologist, who is concerned about food deserts in the US. “And we need bees to accomplish that.”

Commercial pollination is also big business. The California almond industry, which relies almost completely on honeybees, rakes in more than $11bn a year and is the third-most-profitable commodity in the state.

The USDA invests heavily in research to help commercial beekeepers manage disease in their colonies and figure out ways to counteract the stress bees experience in pesticide-laden fields. However, the delicate dance between a bee and a flower could rely as much on the mood of the bee as it does on interventions by beekeepers. And statistics show bees have not been in a good mood lately. According to the non-profit Bee Informed Partnership, commercial beekeepers lost 39% of their colonies in the 2021-2022 growing year. This was just a tad lower than the previous year’s loss of 39.7%, the highest mortality rate on record.

While some agricultural operations have tried to improve the survival rate for bees by reducing pesticide use and planting more diverse forage beyond a single crop, a California startup called BeeHero is among the first commercial pollination services to directly address the issue of animal welfare.

The company uses electronic sensors that are placed in hives to monitor the sounds and tonal vibrations of the colony, which BeeHero says reflect the bees’ emotional state. “There is a throb or hum to a colony that is similar to a human heartbeat,” says Huw Evans, head of innovation for BeeHero. “Our sensors feel that hum the way a doctor hears a patient’s heartbeat with a stethoscope.”

The data from the sensors is collected and analyzed for any variations that could indicate harms being caused by the surrounding environment. The information is also fed into an app that beekeepers can use to track the health of their hives in real time. In addition to periodically driving into the fields to physically inspect their hives, beekeepers can also check on their bees 24/7 through their phones.

BeeHero has raised $64m in venture capital and is pollinating approximately 100,000 acres of California almond groves. But not everyone – Buchmann included – thinks technology that monitors bee health is the right path forward. Buchmann instead wants a solution that addresses the root cause by changing industrial agricultural practices to be more bee friendly so there is no need to put sensors in hives. When he was attending graduate school at the University of California, Davis, in the

1970s, the almond industry was much smaller and the groves were filled with a diversity of flowering plants, like a well-stocked supermarket that blanketed the ground beneath the almond trees.

“The ground used to be buzzing with bees,” recalls Buchmann. “But no more. Now the almonds fall on bare ground or plastic sheeting and are vacuumed up by big harvesting units.”

For Buchmann and Chittka, the reason for creating a world where bees can be happy is much bigger than the human need for crop pollination. Both men say they have been profoundly changed by their discoveries of emotion- like states in bees. The mysterious, alien mind of a bee fills them with a sense of wonder as well as a conviction that creatures without a backbone have rights, too.

“These unique minds, regardless of how much they may differ from our own, have as much justification to exist as we do,” says Chittka. “It is a wholly new aspect of how weird and wonderful the world is around us.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/02/bees-intelligence-minds-pollination?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other