Most of us are aware of the hive mind-the power of bees as an amazing collective. But do we know how uniquely intelligent bees are as individuals? In The Mind of a Bee, Lars Chittka draws from decades of research, including his own pioneering work, to argue that bees have remarkable cognitive abilities. He shows that they are profoundly smart, have distinct personalities, can recognize flowers and human faces, exhibit basic emotions, count, use simple tools, solve problems, and learn by observing others. They may even possess consciousness. Bees kept in an unlit lab with no windows surprised researchers by scent-marking trails upon which they walked in the dark. “Life, uh, finds a way” - Ian Malcom

The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka - Audiobook | Scribd The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka - Audiobook | Scribd

The Mind of a Bee is a fascinating book that I hope will be read and understood by as broad an audience as possible, so that the important conclusions within may be shared more widely."—Amanda Williams, Buzz about Bees The anatomy and physiology of a worker bee’s brain and sensory systems are described in good detail. Likewise, for a bee’s learning process including information about acquisition and recall. The topic of pain is covered and we learn that, like us, insects have receptors that register tissue damage and pain but that alarm pheromones flood their nervous systems with built in painkillers making them perhaps unaware of injuries. Most of us are aware of the hive mind—the power of bees as an amazing collective. But do we know how uniquely intelligent bees are as individuals? In The Mind of a Bee, Lars Chittka draws from decades of research, including his own pioneering work, to argue that bees have remarkable cognitive abilities. He shows that they are profoundly smart, have distinct personalities, can recognize flowers and human faces, exhibit basic emotions, count, use simple tools, solve problems, and learn by observing others. They may even possess consciousness. Lars Chittka is professor of sensory and behavioural ecology at Queen Mary University, London. Related Categories A wonderful journey into the fascinating world of bee intelligence and consciousness."— Conservation BiologyHe thinks bees have emotions, can plan and imagine things, and can recognise themselves as unique entities distinct from other bees. He draws these conclusions from experiments in his lab with female worker bees. “Whenever a bee gets something right, she gets a sugar reward. That’s how we train them, for example, to recognise human faces.” In this experiment, bees shown several monochrome images of human faces learn that one is associated with a sugar reward. “Then, we give them a choice of different faces and no rewards, and ask: which do you choose now? And indeed, they can find the correct one out of an array of different faces.” Bees also have their own dance language which they use to represent distance, direction, and duration, to tell hive members where to go to find flower patches. Besides humans, bees are the only known animal to use symbolism to indicate actual places. Bees also have culture that can be passed down from one generation to the next. However, in colder climates, it seems that cultural evolution stops in the winter because of hibernation. Also, bees are not a "hive mind" like you see in science fiction (no animal is, as far as we can tell), each bee is very much an individual and can have its own ideas about itself and the world. Oh and bees are also self aware. It takes them only a dozen to two dozen training sessions to become “proficient face recognisers”, he said.

The Mind of a Bee | Princeton University Press

Thanks to Lars Chittka’s captivating account of bees’ thinking and feeling, I now look with fresh eyes at these small animals. They plan ahead, feel pain, and express their very own personalities. The ingenious experimental evidence Chittka offers in support of these and many other points is as convincing as it is fascinating.”―Barbara J. King, author of Animals’ Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity and in the Wild But when Chittka deliberately trained a “demonstrator bee” to carry out a task in a sub-optimal way, the “observer bee” would not simply ape the demonstrator and copy the action she had seen, but would spontaneously improve her technique to solve the task more efficiently “without any kind of trial and error”. On swarming Chittka makes a reference to the quite “eccentric” beekeeper Maurice Maeterlinc (awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911). Among his books is The Life of the Bee (1901), and I found a free version in the Internet Archive, as an ePub-book – this book is lovely but has to be reviewed another time! Fascinating and thorough. The small font seemed uninviting when I first began but fit the content and tone of the book quite well. Nicely illustrated explanations of many of the scientific experiments which were cited.Lars Chittka’s The Mind of a Bee is a mind-blowing presentation of scientific evidence and insight showing beyond any reasonable doubt that bees have awareness, memories, basic emotions, intelligence, and personalities―and that what we are doing to them and their world has not just practical but moral implications.”―Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words and Becoming Wild Bees have 300 degree vision and their eyes process information faster than any human's. All of their nutrition comes from flowers and each individual flower provides only a tiny meal so bees have to travel great distances to obtain all the nutrition that they need. They are competing with many other insects for this nutrition. Chittka dispels the myth that worker honey bees are cold blooded and explains why they like drinking warm nectar and how they can learn to associate the colour of flowers with nectar temperature and can predict nectar temperatures based on past experiences.