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Book reviews
The Mind of a Bee
Lars Chittka
260 pages, Illustrated in colour and B&W, 16 x24 cm, Hardback, Princeton University Press, Princeton/Oxford 1st Edition 2022, ISBN: 978-0-691-18047-2, List price: £25
Reviewed by Martin Kunz, Management Team member IBRA, Owner Diversity Honeys Ltd.
Bees are a great conversation opener when meeting a stranger at a party. And if the new acquaintance is really keen and asks for recommendations on books to read, until now I recommended Thomas Seeley’s ‘Honeybee Democracy’ and Jürgen Tautz’ ‘The Buzz about Bees’.
The next person who asks me will have a third title added to this list: Lars Chittka’s The Mind of a Bee: While Seeley looks at the ‘decision making’ process of a swarm (which will make any Political Scientist jealous), and Tautz describes the incredible capabilities of bees at colony level, i.e. as a ‘super organism’, Chittka focusses on individual bees which turn out to be unbelievably complex beings. (The cover shows the orchid bee Eilossa sp. Euglossini because he is not only talking about honey bees; many of the experiments designed and described are done with bumble bees – as their size makes monitoring somewhat easier).
I must admit that even though I learnt what little beekeeping skills I have from a Demeter apiary, where every effort was made to be gentle with the bees, it was also considered ‘normal’ and not an issue, really, if in the process of an inspection a bee or two were squashed. It was referred to as ‘making stamps’.
After reading Lars Chittka’s book I will be even more careful to try and avoid this: Each and every individual bee is a marvel of nature and should be treated with utmost respect.
In order to do the book justice, I will simply follow its chronology. Chittka prefaces each chapter with a quote by bee researchers, most of whom died long ago (Lubbock Huber, Maeterlinck, … and of course Darwin). Part of this humbling list is a Charles Turner, an African American scientist (1867-1923), who despite his limited means (as a result of discrimination) did cutting edge experiments and had insights way ahead of his times. I had never heard his name before:
The Introduction (Chapter 1) Chittka states the aim of his book: to convince the reader that ‘each individual bee has a mind’.
Chapter 2 is all about vision, from Karl von Frisch’s experiment that proved that bees could see colour (against established scientific ‘wisdom’ which had him worry if he would be stymied at the beginning of his career for challenging the ‘big names’), to arguing whether bee colour vision evolved in response to flower colours. His conclusion: it was the other way around. Before plants turned to pollination by insects, the environment was mostly green and brown.
Chapter 3 explores the amazing capacity of bees to navigate in darkness and under cloudy skies. Chittka gives a detailed description of the bees’ anatomy that is the basis for their polarization sensitivity and their capability to make use of magnetic fields for finding their way around hive and foraging areas. Among other amazing insights he explains why bees do not visit flowers that have just yielded their nectar: flowers are (literally) grounded (i.e. negatively charged), bees (because they are flying) are positively charged. When a bee visits a flower, its negative charge briefly turns into a positive one – which tells the next visitor that right now there is no nectar to be had, landing on the flower would be a waste of time and energy.
Chapter 4 discusses ‘instinct’ – and Chittka dismisses the notion that bees are guided by instinct alone. An interesting experiment, first done by Huber, but repeated recently, is to offer bees a glass ceiling to start building comb on. As glass is too slippery, the bees ‘simply’ started at the bottom and built upwards. Put glass on the bottom, too, and they start from the side. Put glass on the opposite side – they will bent the comb at a right angle ... Could the ability to deal with a problem that they definitely never encountered in nature really be instinct driven alone?
Chapter 5 looks at the ‘roots’ of ‘bee intelligence and communication’, in particular the evolution and deciphering of the waggle dances (A. mellifera is not the only one to dance).
Chapter 6 explains how bees ‘learn about space’, the use of landmarks for navigation - do they remember them? Do they have ‘mental maps’? The chapter also covers the development of technology that allows scientists to nowadays monitor individual bees (e.g. via harmonic radar technology) – a great improvement over Baron August Sittich Eugen Heinrich von Berlepsch’s method, who, in 1852, had a horse readied for pursuit after having seen a swarm settle in a lime tree. The next day he was able to chase the swarm to its new home one village over…
Chapter 7 explains how bees manage to gain an ‘overview’ of a forage area, while also finding even tiny flowers when collecting nectar: They basically can change flight speeds between a mode of visual intake that is high in speed and resolution, but low in accuracy, with one that is slow with poor resolution but colour enabled. Similarly intriguing is that bees seek out flowers that are warmer / provide warmer nectar – to save energy – even if the difference is as little as 4C.
Chapter 8 adds the argument that bees learn from each other (even across species) to the discussion whether they have ‘intelligence’: In one experiment A. mellifera bees were put into the same hive with A. cerana – and learnt to decode the respective ‘dialects’ of each other’s waggle dances – crucial for the smaller A. cerana which does not have the ability to forage as far as their bigger sisters.
Chapter 9 is where I got slightly lost: The details of the construction of a bee’s brain. Chittka writes: “I invite you to marvel for a few moments at the intricacy of Kenyon’s 1896 brain wiring diagram displayed …” – marvel was about all I could do. On the next page he quotes another early bee scientist, Santiago Ramón y Cajal: “The complexity of the insect retina is something stupendous, disconcerting, and without precedent in other animals. … one is completely overwhelmed.” Indeed. One section in this slightly maddening Chapter 9 that I could relate to is that, apparently, bees have three distinct sleep phases – and there are indications that, during sleep, they consolidate memories from the previous day’s foraging.
Chapter 10 poses the question whether individual bees have ‘personalities’, and again the answer seems to be ‘yes’: Some bees work harder than others, others put in ‘easy foraging shifts’. And the individuals are, apparently, selfaware: Big bumblebees (workers vary in size by a factor of 10 – which does not change over their lifetime) are ‘conscious’ of their body size – if need be, they ‘angle’ their flight in order to squeeze through a small opening. Colonies also contain fast and slow learners – but the latter, too, contribute: The faster ones apparently work so hard – they don’t last as long as the slow ones, which means, that over the course of their lives, these end up contributing more to the hive than the fast super collectors.
Which leads to Chapter 11 and the question: “Do bees have consciousness?”, which in turn is explored via the question: Do they have feelings such as pain, are they “conscious of their own experience”? An experiment with (artificial) crab spiders resulted in the finding that bees learn to become weary of these predators and learn to avoid them. Chittka obviously could not resist straying beyond bees (and nor can I) when he explains that “… male fruit flies experience ejaculation as rewarding – but if they are deprived of mating opportunities, they begin to seek out alcohol, which is often found in nature in the form of fermented fruits.” (Sounds familiar?)
Back to bees: It is by now well known that bees seek out flowers with low levels of caffeine and nicotine in their nectar – are they looking for a fix?
Chittka ends his book by responding to potential critics, who might explain away all the ‘intelligent behaviours’ in one way or another as being possible without any conscious awareness, but confirms his own cautious conclusion:
“On balance, the evidence for at least a simple form of consciousness in bees is mounting.”
However: Even if the critics are right: Read this book – and be wowed.
There are, of course far more amazing descriptions of experiments, insights, … than I could hint at, e.g. the fact that bumblebees learned to work together to pull a string in order to ‘free’ a dish with a sugar solution reward …
The book is well and helpfully illustrated (in particular with drawings that explain the set-up of experiments), with only one illustration somehow so badly printed as to be useless (p 148) – but as it is part of that chapter 9, I probably would have struggled to understand this particular one in detail even if it covered a whole page.
As a teaser to the book there is this free to view 80 min lecture which L. Chittka gave to the Linnean Society of London: https://tinyurl.com/yvvmhha9
Hand Pollination In China: The Shadow Of The Future
Mariann Fercsik
Northern Bee Books, 2022, Paperback, 120 pages, beautifully illustrated, ISBN-10: 1914934199 / ISBN-13: 978-1914934193
Reviewed by John Phipps
I like this book very much. It works for me on several levels: as a strong portfolio of carefully executed photographs; as an explanation as to why orchards are being pollinated by hand in the Sichuan Province of China; and fascinating information on the communities who carry out this almost feudal type of work.
In order to research this important topic, Mariann Fercsik travelled to China at her own expense, having just missed being awarded a Joan Wakelin Bursary (she was in second place!) and as a result we have yet again a vivid example of the dire effect of mankind on the environment. Fortunately, Mariann found the farmers to be extreme helpful and hospitable.
The story is rather complex: farmers changing from traditional agricultural practices to the creation of large orchards of pears which gave them a better income; the impact this monoculture practice had by drawing large levels of pests to the orchards; the increasing use of pesticidesand the subsequent deaths of each farmer's few colonies of bees; colonies which might have been brought in for pollination moved instead to lower slopes to avoid pesticide poisoning; the essential need for cross- pollination and the purchase of suitable compatible pollens partly because the local trees which might provide cross-pollination flowered at a different time; the acquisition of the very arduous and technical skills by the workers to ensure that good pollination could be achieved.
The photos carefully selected for the work were taken with Mariann’s Hasselblad (heavy, so not an easy camera to travel with!) but she was intent on getting both the right detail into her photos in the wonderful square format. As such we get not only the photos about the pollination work, but also images of the landscape and the people in their village communities. The single portraits of people are outstanding and truly reveal the the impact of their work and the environment in which they live.
Mariann has duel British and Hungarian citizenship; she studied photography at university in London, and specialises in social and environmental issues. She uses a Hasselblad with 120 film stock as, unlike digital photography:
Mariann hopes that her work will achieve its purpose of highlighting existing environmental problems, especially with this project the increasing menace of the insecticide poisoning of honey bees.
