In What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories, and Personalities of Bees (Island Press, March 7, 2023), pollination ecologist Stephen Buchmann brings readers into the mysterious, fascinating minds of bees and introduces the scientists and researchers uncovering their alien ways of seeing the world.
Although bee brains are incredibly small—just one million neurons compared to humans’ 100 billion—they have remarkable abilities to navigate, learn, solve problems, communicate, and remember.
Here are some surprising facts about the inner world of bees, the insect you thought you knew!
- Global bee diversity is about the same as the number of fish species. There are 21,000 species in the world, with roughly 3,500 species from the continental US alone.
- Most in the world are actually ground-nesting and solitary, with no queen or workers. Only about 10% of the world’s bees are social, including honeybees and bumblebees.
- Bees are sentient, self-aware, can likely feel pain, and may have a simple form of consciousness.
- Despite being the size of a poppy seed, a honeybee’s brain is quite complex. It has almost one million neurons and up to a billion synaptic connections.
- Bee eyes detect ultraviolet light. They can see hidden UV nectar guide patterns that are invisible to humans.
- Bees have been trained how to use a string as a tool, pulling the string to access a sugar reward under a clear plastic cover.
- Far more than mindless drones, bees may actually play. In a laboratory, bumblebees rolled small wooden balls around without rewards.
- Bees can not only count to four, but they can also remember the shapes, scents, and colors of flowers for up to three days.
- 130 million years ago, bees evolved from carnivorous wasps during the early Cretaceous period. These first ones were tiny, just a few millimeters long, matching the size of the earliest flowers.
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