Scientists prove that bumblebees love to play with toys

Bumblebees blocking the way from your house to your car? No problem. New research suggests an interesting and highly entertaining way to ward them off. Give the critters a tiny wooden ball and they might get so busy they stop terrorizing your morning commute.

On Thursday, a team of researchers presented evidence that bumblebees, like humans, like to play with fun little objects.

After 45 bumblebees took part in a series of experiments, it became clear that the bees were making every effort to roll wooden balls repeatedly, even though there was no apparent incentive to do so. In other words, the bees appear to have been “playing” with the balls. Also, like humans, there seemed to be an age when bees lost their playfulness.

According to an article about the findings, published last month in Animal Behavior journal, younger bees rolled more balls than older bees, just as you’d expect children to play more games than adults. The team also saw that male bees rolled the ball longer than female bees. (I’m not sure if this bit translates to human behavior though.)

“This research provides strong evidence that insect minds are far more sophisticated than we can imagine,” said Lars Chittka, professor of sensory and behavioral ecology at Queen Mary University of London, who led the study, in a statement . “There are many animals that play just for fun, but most examples come from young mammals and birds.”

It’s a pretty big deal to know that insects like to play because we can infer that they’re probably feeling some kind of positive emotion. and the raises important moral questions about how we treat them. Do we respect nonverbal animals as much as we should? Do we even register them as conscious beings?

Frans BM de Waal, author of the bestselling book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are, sums up part of the problem by saying, “Because animals don’t talk, they have been denied their feelings.”

This is particularly true for bees. For example, a 2011 study showed that bees exhibited changes in brain chemistry when excited or simply being shaken around by researchers. These changes directly correlate to anxiety, depression, and other psychological conditions we’re used to seeing in humans and other mammals — but perhaps because insects can’t talk, let alone cry or show facial expressions, we don’t often think about them as to have feelings.

“We’re producing more and more evidence… to do whatever it takes to protect insects that are a million miles from the mindless, unfeeling creatures they’re traditionally thought to be,” Chittka said.

I mean, check out the video below to see a bunch of chubby bees rolling around on balls like they’re in a circus. It’s really adorable and extra cute because we know they only do it for the fun of it.

Chittka and other scientists basically placed the 45 bumblebees in an arena and then presented them with different scenarios in which they could choose to “play” or not “play.”

An experiment gave the bugs access to two chambers. The first contained moving bullets and the other was empty. As expected, the bees showed a preference for the chamber associated with the moving spheres.

In another situation, the bees were given the option of either going to a feeding site via an unobstructed path, or deviating from the path and going to a location with wooden balls. Quite a few chose the ball pool. In fact, individual insects rolled balls between 1 and a whopping 117 times over the course of the experiment.

Yes, that means they literally chose to play with balls Meal.

To avoid confounding variables, the researchers took care to isolate the concept of playing with the balls. For example, they did not offer the bees a reward for playing with the balls and ruled out that they were in any way stressed in the no-ball chambers.

“It’s certainly mind-blowing, sometimes amusing, to watch bumblebees display something of a game,” said Samadi Galpayage, lead author of the study and researcher at Queen Mary University, in a statement. “They approach these ‘toys’ and manipulate them over and over again. This shows once again that despite their small size and tiny brain, they are more than just small robotic beings.”

“They can actually experience positive emotional states, even if they’re rudimentary, like other larger fluffy or not-so-fluffy animals do,” Galpayage continued. “This type of finding has implications for our understanding of insect sentience and welfare, and will hopefully encourage us to increasingly respect and protect life on Earth.”