If bumblebees can play, does it mean they have feelings? | Hacker News Reader

If bumblebees can play, does it mean they have feelings?

npr.org

13 pointspseudolus10 comments

Next logical step in the agenda. Taking preliminary science as absolute truth and building from there to inject ideology in the society.

If bumblebees love to play football, we should have by now a ton of empirical observations of bumblebees videotaped doing the same in nature where there is not a lack of small stones or fruits. Were are those recordings?

Another perfectly possible explanation is bumblebees instintively cleaning tiny stems or obstacles from the landing strip in front of the colony

An a third would be bumblebees deterring and fighting against what they perceive as "beetles" or other insects, that could steal or became parasites of the colony.

But not... bumblebees must be Ronaldo now. This is that your infantile audience expects

I agree with you. You already named some explanations with the same likelihood of the data, but a far higher prior probability. Bumblebees having feelings is a good way down the explanatory chain, and would warrant a lot more additional pieces of evidence.

The study specifically addresses both of named explanations.

That would be enough if the two named other explanations and bumblebees having rudimentary feelings would make up all of the explanation space. I have doubts about that.

“Could ball rolling be the result of bees clearing clutter? Object relocation, such as the removal of dead adults and larvae from the nest or movement of debris within the nest, is naturally performed by bumble bees (Munday & Brown, 2018). Therefore, it may be that ball rolling was a result of bees attempting to remove objects from what they considered their hive space. However, balls were located well outside the nest and in sequestered areas which provided a direct decluttered path from the nest to the food sources. […]”

“[….] While ball rolling, bees partially enveloped the ball, which may resemble positions taken when attempting to mate or sting when defending their nest or in an agitated state. However, we observed no instances of genitalia eversion by males (Amin et al., 2012; Djegham et al., 1994), defensive buzzing (Pritchard & Vallejo-Marín, 2020) or stinger extension by females while in contact with the balls. Therefore, the motor patterns involved in ball rolling are structurally different from more adaptive activities in bumble bees' normal repertoire.”

-- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000334722... (linked from TFA)

There is a lot we don't understand in nature. Maybe the humble bumble bee has deep philosophical thought about it's own existence and requires escapism through play. There is a viral video of bees opening a soda bottle.

It also could be that those wooden balls just had the right odor, gustatoric or sensoric properties to be very interesting to them. What can they do besides cling to it and move around with it anyway? Colored wood, that hasn't been sufficiently cleaned and maybe touched by unprotected hands in an otherwise dull environment, could be a wealth of information to them, that triggers various routines. Maybe it is behavior to explore, while leaving again a chemical trail, that makes the object more interesting for other bees that follow. The observations based on the age or gender of the bees could have a lot to do with previous interactions the object had.

Ants may run into a death spiral, when their chemical path closes in a loop. Insects are sophisticated sensors, that communicated chemically and based on simple algorithms to great success.

So there could be just algorithmic behavior behind this.

We are indeed still far of from bumble bee football, but with the right chemical trails, who knows what could be possible.

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