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Study Shows Bumblebees Have Capacity for Culture

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Nicholas Vincent is a passionate environmentalist and freelance writer. He is deeply committed to promoting... Read More

Bumblebee, bombus terrestris on a flower

When we think of culture, we tend to think of humans, with our complex societies and intricate languages. But it turns out that bumblebees, those fuzzy and industrious insects, may also have a capacity for culture. According to a recent study in the journal PLOS Biology, bumblebees can learn to solve puzzles from one another, suggesting that even invertebrates like these social insects have a capacity for culture.

Source: ITV News/Youtube

“These creatures are really quite incredible. They’re really, really good at learning despite having these tiny, tiny brains,” says Alice Bridges, a behavioral ecologist at Anglia Ruskin University in England. Bridges wondered whether bumblebees might have a capacity for culture since it has become increasingly common across the animal kingdom.

To study culture in bumblebees in the lab, Bridges trained a few industrious bees to perform a novel behavior: solving a puzzle box. She held up the result: “Basically, I built it out of Petri dishes,” she says. The base of the Petri dish held the reward: a drop of super sweet sugar water. Bridges cut a small hole in the lid “to form a rotating top that can be spun by pushing either on this red tab clockwise or the blue tab anti-clockwise.”

Then, she placed these tutor bees inside different colonies, along with the puzzle boxes. The experiment ultimately played itself out. In colonies where the tutor bee had originally learned to push the red tab, the other bees in the colony usually pushed the red tab. In colonies where the tutor bee was trained to push the blue tab, their fellow bees tended to do the same.

“We found that the behaviors spread among the colonies,” she says. “They copied the demonstrators’ behavior even when occasionally they discovered that they could do the alternative.”

Bridges and her colleagues at Queen Mary University report in their new study that bumblebees can transmit certain behaviors — culturally. “We were taught that a lot of insect behavior was kind of hardwired,” says Jessica Ware, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History who wasn’t involved in the research. “And what this paper does is kind of turn that on its head. I mean, who knows what grasshoppers are capable of doing — or the lowly cockroach.”

Of course, insect culture might look rather different from the culture seen among other animals, particularly humans. It’s a question of degree, says Andy Whiten, a cognitive ethologist who studies wild animal minds at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. “Cultures vary enormously across species in ways which I think have different implications for the complexity of brains that are involved,” he says.

Still, Bridges argues that her work with bumblebees shows that perhaps culture isn’t that unusual. “Maybe it doesn’t require very, very complex cognitive mechanisms,” she says. “Maybe it’s not some pinnacle of cognition that only a few species have. Maybe it’s actually very widespread.”

The research shows that animals are much more complex and intelligent than we once thought. As we continue to learn more about animal behavior, we should consider how we can use this knowledge to better protect and preserve their habitats. It’s time to think about the welfare of all creatures, no matter how big or small.

So, next time you see a bumblebee buzzing around, remember that they are more than just a pollinator. They are intelligent creatures capable of learning from each other and passing that knowledge down to future generations. Let’s do our part to protect them and their habitats.