If there’s anything members of the animal kingdom have in common, it’s their affinity for play.
For most animals, play is as common as eating and sleeping. Whether puppies, lorikeet birds or humans, the art of play (an action that does not lead to any obvious outcome besides enjoyment) is vital for cognitive development. It makes sense then that insects are also prone to play. While insects aren’t usually the first species on our minds when considering playful animals, new research from the University of Queen Mary and The University of Oulu suggests bumblebees also revel in the simple pleasure of play.
The research follows an experiment conducted by Samadi Galpayage Dona in 2017. This study discovered buff-tailed bumble bee’s ability to transport balls into goals when presented with a sugar-based reward. While the study successfully proved bee’s ability to move balls for a reward, researchers accidentally stumbled on another significant finding: bees may experience emotions. Realising that the bee participants were stopping to roll the balls (perching on top of a ball and rotating it along the floor) for no other reason than pleasure, Galpayage Dona theorised that bees were able to play. Their most recent experiment set out to test this hypothesis.
Conducted by Galpayage Dona and her team, the study involved placing bumble bees in an enclosed area with 18 coloured balls. Despite the fact that the bees were provided with an unobstructed route to a sugary treat, many stopped to roll the balls around the enclosed space, even though this deviated from the path to food. With no practical benefit (such as finding food or a mate) for the action of ball rolling, researchers like Gordon Burghat were left with “no reservations” towards referring to the action as play.
Furthering the research on the bees’ inclination to play, was the study’s emphasis on how gender and age factors impacted the bee’s likelihood of stopping to roll the balls. While each bee rolled the balls between one and 117 times, male bees and younger bees were actually more likely to play for longer. “Insect minds are far more sophisticated than we might imagine,” said Lars Chittka, a leading scientist behind the research and author of The Mind of a Bee. While studies conducted as early as 1984 have explored insect’s ability to feel pain, few have explored their ability to feel emotions.
This study is pivotal in our understanding of insect’s ability to experience pleasure. We’re only left wondering what other emotions these insects are capable of experiencing.
