Lars Chittka is professor of sensory and behavioral ecology at Queen Mary University of London, where he founded a new Research Centre for Psychology in 2008 and was its scientific director until 2012. He is the author of The Mind of a Bee and is the coeditor of Cognitive Ecology of Pollination. He studied Biology in Berlin and completed his PhD studies under the supervision of Randolf Menzel in 1993. He has carried out extensive work on the behaviour, cognition and ecology of bumble bees and honey bees, and their interactions with flowers. His discoveries have made a substantial impact on the understanding of animal intelligence and its neural-computational underpinnings. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed articles, and has been an editor of biology’s foremost open access journal PLoS Biology since 2004. He is an elected Member of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), a Fellow of the Linnean Society and Royal Entomological Society, as well as the Royal Society of Biology.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Tell us about a day in the life of a bee at one, two, and three weeks?

LARS CHITTKA

Most bees are quite short-lived, not all bees. So queen bees can live for many years, up to seven years, and some stingless bees, the queens can even live much longer than that, but their lives are less exciting in a sense that they are, most of their lives, cave animals, where most of what they do is egg laying.

So when we're talking about intelligence tests and bees, these are mostly done with the worker bees, and they only live for a few weeks. And it might be surprising to many people that an animal this short-lived can learn anything at all because, of course, in humans, the process of acquiring crucial life skills takes much longer, many years typically.

So when a bee first emerges from the pupa - bees spend their first few days as little grubs inside a wax pot. And this larval stage, of course, there isn't much learning going on. They have a very pampered and easy life in that they are basically immersed in the food that they're required to grow.

And then they pupate and turn from what are formerly little helpless grubs into adult bees. Once the bee emerges from the pupa, they have a number of different tasks waiting for them, which in honey bees a fairly defined sequence where the bee might in her first few days simply be involved in the many duties inside the hive – to clean cells, to build wax comb, to feed the larva – and then to transition to their life as a forager."

And that's what we get to see most of the time when we observe bees in the wild, that final life stage when they've left all their hive duties in the past and are now flower foragers, where they collect nectar pollen, bringing it back to the colony and in that transition, from within hive duties to what a bee does outside the hive, the whole brain gets reorganized.

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So I think this observation that there are sensory cues available that are, either completely different to what's available to us, including a magnetic compass sense that's accessible to some animals, but not us. And also within the sensory modalities that we have available, you find often that different animals, including bees use them completely differently or have a completely different spectrum. So bees can see ultraviolet light. We cannot. And bats can hear ultrasound, but we cannot.

And we think because the way we sense our world is comprehensive and it feels comprehensive to us. And we feel that there is a validity to how we see it, we think that is a kind of complete picture of the environment and a vertical representation of what is out there. That is not the case. So other animals see the same world completely differently from how we do. And so there are limitations. We only perceive certain parts of the environment. Those parts that evolution has given us the kinds of sensors for that have been beneficial in our evolutionary past, but it's by no means a vertical or complete reflection of the environment.

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The direction of the sun in the Northern Hemisphere in the middle of the day, it will be 90 degrees to the right of the sun early in the morning, and 90 degrees to the left of the sun in the evening. So you cannot use the sun as a compass cue unless you also have a sense of time. And bees have that too. They have an inner clock, a so-called circadian clock.

They know what time it is and can use that knowledge together with the current position of the sun to navigate to a particular destination. And an additional challenge, of course, if you're using the sun for navigation, is that the sun is not always visible. So you might have a situation where the sun is hidden behind clouds, or it's currently behind a mountain or it's even, if it's still light, it might be just below the horizon.

So then what do you do if you can't see the sun, but you want to use a sun compass? How do you find your way? And this is where polarization vision comes in. So you might recall from school lessons that light has both particle-type properties that have light quanta as well as wave properties. So it swings in a particular direction in the same way as, let's say, if you attach a rope to one wall and then shake the rope up and down at the other end, it swings in one particular direction, not another one. And light has such wave properties, which we cannot see.

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If you really want to discover things and feel that excitement of finding new things that no one's found out before, the only way I think to do that is to go into a field that inspires you and to be, rather than being motivated by funding success and so on, is to be motivated by the kinds of things that you study and that you might find out.

The world of bees is under threat, and that is not because bees are singled out, but because bees live in the environment that we all share and they are a kind of a canary in the coal mine for what's going on more largely in destroying our environment.

And in a sense they are, I think, a useful sort of mascot and icon to highlight these troubles, but they are only a signpost of other things that are also under threat. We need the bee for our own food because they pollinate our crops, and they pollinate the flowers that we enjoy, but I think their utility for us is not the only reason to support them and their environment. I think the growing appreciation that the world that surrounds us is full of sophisticated and unique minds places on us a kind of onus and obligation to preserve the diversity of these minds that are out there and make sure that they continue to thrive.

Photo credit: Markus Scholz / Leopoldina

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Ellen Efstathiou with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Ellen Efstathiou. Digital Media Coordinators are Jacob A. Preisler and Megan Hegenbarth. 

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).