Does a Bee Feel Pain? | Bee's Mind PART1
The science behind how bees think, decide and respond
Science spent decades assuming the answer was no. The experiments that followed were more complicated than anyone could have expected.
Question Nobody Ever Asked
For most of the 20th century, it was not considered a proper question by science to ask whether or not insects feel pain. It was considered something along the lines of category mistake.
Pain, as a phenomenon studied through the perspective of vertebrate neuroscience, often required structures in brain, such as cortex. Insects did not have a cortex. Thus, the assumption was made.
No cortex. No pain.
It turns out to be a lot more complicated than that. Not because insects do, for sure, feel pain in the way that people do. It’s much more complicated than that. But simply because the assumption that they don’t, stated with such confidence and without much further investigations, influenced all research done during decades, policies and the very perception of creatures with such a different nervous system.
This article is about the actual science on the topic. And this is not a simple yes or no.
Bee’s Mind explores the questions we once thought had simple answers: Can bees feel? How do they decide? How do their experiences shape their behaviour? Subscribe to follow the full series.
Pain and Nociception Are Not the Same Thing
The first thing to understand is a difference that changes almost everything about this question.
Nociception is the detection of things that can cause damage. It is a biological process where specialised receptors detect things like heat, pressure, or chemical damage and send signals through the nervous system that create protective responses. It does not automatically mean there is a subjective experience. An animal can detect damage and react to it without necessarily feeling pain.
Pain is something different.
Pain is the subjective experience of suffering. It is what something feels like from the inside when it experiences something harmful. It does not only need detecting a signal, but also processing that signal in a way that creates an unpleasant experience.
Bees almost certainly have nociception. They respond to things that can harm them. They avoid dangerous situations. They change their behaviour after injury.
But whether they experience pain in the way we understand it is a much harder question. And this is where science becomes uncomfortable. Because the answer is not clear yet.
The Morphine Question
One of the most discussed areas of research looks at if substances that reduce pain responses in other animals also affect bees.
In 2022, researchers looked at the effects of morphine on honey bees and found that it changed their behaviour in ways that were consistent with an analgesic-like effect. Morphine is an opioid. In humans and other animals, opioids interact with systems that are involved in regulating pain.
The interesting thing is that insects have biological systems that are involved in regulating responses to harmful experiences. However, this does not prove that bees feel pain.
This difference is important. Having a similar biological mechanism does not automatically mean having the same subjective experience. (How could we when their brain is much much smaller of a human brain.)
So the question is not if a bee experiences pain exactly like we do. The queestion is whether its nervous system can create some kind of internal negative state when its body is damaged. And this is the question scientists are still trying to understand.
Subscribe for grounded bee science, beekeeping and the ecology most people never get taught.
The Pessimistic Bee
The most fascinating experiments in this area came from research into what scientists call cognitive bias in bees.
In 2011, researchers at Newcastle University trained honey bees to connect one smell with a sucrose reward and another smell with a bitter quinine solution, which bees don’t like. Then some of the bees were shaken strongly.
The shaking was used as a stressful experience and the aim was not to injure the bees. After this, the researchers gave the bees a new smell that was somewhere between the positive and negative smells they had learned. The shaken-stressed bees were more likely to react as if the uncertain smell was the negative one.
In humans, this kind of pattern is called a pessimistic cognitive bias. When we are stressed or in a negative state, we are more likely to see uncertain situations in a negative way.
The bees appeared to show something similar. Does this prove bees have emotions?
No.
But it suggests something very interesting. The bee is not only reacting like a simple machine following instructions. Their past experiences and internal state can influence how they understands the world.
The Bee's Mind is a new series on Bees & Beyond. Paid subscribers get every article in full as it publishes.
What the Nervous System Does and Does Not Tell Us
For a long time, the argument against insect consciousness was simple:
‘Their brains are too small. They do not have the same structures that mammals have.
Therefore, they cannot experience anything.’
But brain size alone turned out to be a poor way to measure intelligence.
A honey bee brain contains around one million neurons. A human brain contains around eighty-six billion. The difference is enormous. But intelligence is not only about the number of neurons. It is also about how those neurons are organised.
The bee’s mushroom bodies are highly complex structures involved in learning, memory and decision-making. They allow bees to combine information from different senses, remember experiences and change their behaviour based on what happened before. And these mushroom bodies are not the same as the human cortex.
But evolution does not always build the same solutions twice. A different brain does not automatically mean a simple brain.
A Changing View of Animal Minds
In 2012, a group of neuroscientists signed the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, challenging the idea that conscious experience could only exist in animals with brains similar to ours.
The declaration focused mainly on mammals, birds and other animals with complex nervous systems. But it helped change the bigger scientific conversation. Scientists started asking a different question.
Not: “Does this animal have a brain like ours?”
But: “Does this animal show signs of internl states, flexible behaviour, learning and decision-making?”
Insects became part of this conversation andnot because we have proven they are conscious. But because we started to realise that our old ideas about what consciousness needs may have been too narrow.
In the rest of this article, we look at what happens when a bee is injured, what the experiments with grooming, behaviour and pain-relieving substances can tell us. And why scientists are still cautious about the question of bee pain. The Bee’s Mind is a new series on Bees & Beyond. Paid subscribers get every articles in full as it gets published.
