
What Do Bees’ Joy and Pain Really Tell Us About Insect Minds?
If sentience, like intelligence, can be independent of phylogeny (place in Darwin’s tree of life), the conventional picture of evolution might need rethinkingThis summer entomologist Lars Chittka made another plea in Scientific American for the recognition of insects as capable of emotion. It’s been shown that bumblebees can learn “specific strategies for opening a puzzle box” by mimicking the behavior of previously trained bees. But, he says,it goes beyond that: Bees, for example, can count, grasp concepts of sameness and difference, learn complex tasks by observing others, and know their own individual body dimensions, a capacity associated with consciousness in humans. They also appear to experience both pleasure and pain. In other words, it now looks like at least some species of insects-and maybe all of them-are sentient. Lars Chittka, “Do Insects Feel Joy and Pain?”,Scientific American, July 1, 2023 He decided Read More ›