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Dr. Lars Chittka (vegetarian) is a professor in sensory and behavioral ecology at Queen Mary University of London, UK. His book “The Mind of a Bee,” published in 2022, is a “rich and surprising exploration” into the cognitive abilities of bees. “I think the gradual exploration of bees’ psychology and the question of whether they’re not just smart but also likely sentient creatures has had a very direct impact on my diet choice, for example. It’s only just, well, six, seven years ago that I started being vegetarian.” “It’s been known for a long time that bees have good spatial memory. And we had also known that they have to learn the flowers that they visit. But more recently, over the past few decades, we have discovered that bees’ intelligence, their cognitive abilities, go much further than just the tasks that they encounter on a daily basis in nature. So, bees can count, they can recognize images of human faces, they can even learn simple tool use by observing each other.”“Many species of bees are solitary. They’re invariably the females that build the house. And if these fail to find their way home, then all their offspring die. So there’s a very strong selection pressure for a precise spatial memory. So that’s something that’s certainly shaped their intelligence, their learning behavior.” “We trained bees to associate an image of a human face, a black and white photograph, with a sugar reward. And indeed, they’re very good at that. So, they’ll find the correct face with about 80% probability, even if their faces are quite similar. And the same ones might also be used in a person recognition.” “We’ve researched the intelligence, the thinking capacity of bees for decades, and we find them to be uniquely intelligent in terms of problem-solving skills. They responded to a threat that they had basically conjured up from past experiences that wasn’t actually on these flowers. And this, to us, looked like a post-traumatic stress disorder in humans.” “There’s a whole spectrum of emotion-like states, from good ones to not-so-good ones. All of this points, indeed, to not just intelligence or the capacity to think, but also to feel.”
