Bumblebees have BIG feelings
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What makes bumblebees so visually striking and different from honeybees?
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Hello, it's Anne Jones here, the creator of What the Duck, and this is a message for the responsible adults listening with children. This episode contains some concepts which might be hard to explain, like consciousness, how to differentiate needs from likes, but it also talks about bees sticking out their tongues. So please enjoy.
Oh my goodness me. It's very
fluffy.
Almost like a cross between a mouse and an insect.
It's very big, by insect size.
A real in-your-face insect.
They're quite gorgeous. It looks like a flying cow.
I'm Dr Anne Jones, host of What The Duck, the podcast which tries to go where no other program goes, you know, into the nitty-gritty of the dorky stuff. Bring on the nerds! on Radio National. And today, I'm on a mission to find out if insects have feelings. Do insects have inner lives, inner thoughts, consciousness? Can they feel pleasure and pain? Do they have hopes and dreams?
Are we working with an organism that is thinking, cognitive, assessing its world, has some sort of inner mental life like us?
Open your mind, little duckies, because we are drilling down into the minds of bumblebees. But every drill rig starts up top, on the surface. And what does the outside of a bumblebee actually look like? This is the fluffiest little bee ever. I mean, the fluffs are literally called a pile, like it's a shag rug from the 70s. All this leads to the appearance of what looks like a Kinder Surprise toy wearing a huge mink stroller coat fit for an heiress. And they sound like this. Now, if you live in Australia, like I do, it's very likely you've never seen or heard one. So, apart from the size of the thing, some species get up to about four centimetres long. They're whoppers. What is the difference between a bumblebee and a honeybee?
The biggest difference is the size of the colony.
How do bumblebee colonies form and what is the queen’s unique life cycle?
Andrew Barron is a comparative neuroscientist from Macquarie University. Yeah, a neuroscientist. Talking to me about bees.
With honeybees, we think of thousands of workers, anything from 15 to 50,000 workers. A big bumblebee colony would be 300 workers. Another big difference is the bumblebee queen founds the nest by herself. So she overwinters on her own in a hollow in the ground, and then in spring, she raises that first generation of workers by herself, and then she builds the
nest. This lady is
goals. She's a dynamo, I tell you. Don't mess with her.
Unlike the honeybee, though, the queen is a little messy. Her nest is more like a chaotic cluster of randomly arranged domey wax pockets. They're tucked away underground or in a cavity. It's not like the cute little hives you might imagine in Winnie the Pooh, but don't hold that against her because she's a self-made woman.
They'll be born in late summer. Their nest will collapse. They'll leave the nest. They'll mate. They'll overwinter, start their own nest in spring, and that nest cycle will last one year.
Holy moly, that is a lot to achieve in one year. But one year, wait. Andrew, are you suggesting that each winter, all of the workers...
Yes, they will die.
Wowzers. That really does seem like a union matter. Yeah.
So you wouldn't think it, but the bumblebee is really easy to work with. This sounds crazy, but if you work in North America or in Europe, you can buy a bumblebee colony and it will be sent to you in a shoebox-sized package in the post. And you've got a lab-based situation where you can work on the behavior of these animals. Obviously, we can't do it in Australia because bumblebees are invasive here.
Mmm, yes. This is why many Aussies have never seen or heard the flying pom-pom. Many, but not all, because...
Yeah, well, I just turned up in
Hobart in 1992. That's Tim Lowe. He's a biologist, author, founder of the Invasive Species Council. And 1992. If you're as old as me, that sounds really recent, but...
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What makes bumblebees so visually striking and different from honeybees?
0:00–3:11
2
How do bumblebee colonies form and what is the queen’s unique life cycle?
3:11–6:04
3
Why are bumblebees considered an invasive species in Tasmania?
6:04–9:17
4
How were bumblebees shipped to labs and used for pollination research?
9:17–12:33
5
What did the rhythm‑learning experiments reveal about bee cognition?
12:33–15:46
6
Can bumblebees transfer learned rhythms across different sensory modalities?
15:46–18:51
7
How does a bumblebee’s tongue response indicate liking or disliking a taste?
18:51–22:01
8
Do bumblebees have inner emotional lives or preferences like humans?
22:01–26:08