Stressed bees are more likely to make pessimistic decisions and lose their zest for life, according to new research. Scientists from the University of Newcastle (Great Britain) discovered that bumblebees have a reaction to adverse events that resembles human emotions.
The results show that stressed bees reduce their reward expectations when agitated, which can influence how they approach flowers and how they pollinate them.
Researchers trained bees to recognize whether a certain color signaled something positive or negative. They learned that certain colors were associated with a location where they received a sweet reward, while other colors indicated locations with much smaller rewards. After the bees learned these associations, two groups were subjected to a simulated predator attack, and a third group was not exposed to any external stress.
The study was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Stressed bees no longer expect to receive rewards
Bees that went through the sham attack were significantly less likely to interpret ambiguous colors as indicating high rewards and visited locations with low rewards more often than those in the control group.
“Our study shows that bees become more pessimistic when stressed, their behavior suggesting that they do not expect to receive rewards,” explained Dr Vivek Nityananda, from Newcastle University.
“Emotions are complex states, and in humans they involve a subjective understanding of what you feel. We will never know if the bees feel something similar. However, our research suggests that bees have similar reactions when stressed and make pessimistic decisions. The best explanation for their behavior is that they do not expect to receive large rewards and show traits similar to those of pessimistic people,” says the researcher, cited by Phys.org.
Scientists believe these findings are important because stress can affect how bees approach and pollinate flowers, as well as their ability to access high-quality rewards.
The results also show that we can see similar responses to emotions in other animals, including insects. In the study, bees were stressed by being shaken or immobilized with a robotic arm equipped with a sponge.
What effects does this bee behavior have on pollination?
“Our study suggests that, like other animals, including humans, bees can experience emotion-like states when stressed, as evidenced by a clear shift toward pessimism. When faced with ambiguity, stressed bees, like a person who sees the glass ‘half empty’, are more likely to expect negative outcomes,” said Dr Olga Procenko, who led the research at Newcastle University and is now a researcher at the University of Birmingham.
“In addition to suggesting that emotion-like states may be evolutionarily conserved, our study opens up new possibilities for understanding how stress affects cognition and behavior in insects, which could provide insights into their responses to environmental challenges and support conservation efforts,” she continued.
Further research is needed to understand exactly what implications this behavior has on flower and plant pollination.
“We need to understand how bees evaluate rewards when they are stressed, and whether these states in bees exhibit other features that we see in emotions. We also need to investigate the neural mechanisms involved and see if bees in the wild show similar reactions,” added Dr. Nityananda.
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Source: www.descopera.ro
