A new study suggests bees may experience pleasure and joy when playing, which would indicate more complex cognitive behavior than previously thought.

Playing is an important behavior in humans — it helps us learn new skills, improve control over our bodies, and also helps with bonding. In other mammals, play has also been documented as an important behavior — but in insects, playing has been far less studied.

For Lars Chittka, a behavioral ecologist at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), peering into the minds of bees has been a long-term interest. Chittka recently published a book called the Mind of a Bee, where he highlights many of the remarkable findings about the intellect and behavior of bees. But this new study came almost by accident.

Chittka and his team were looking at how bumblebees learn complex behaviors. In a scientific setup, bees had to move wooden balls, and if they moved them to the right place, they got a sweet reward. But the researchers started noticing how some bees would just push the balls around even without any reward. This was puzzling, so the researchers started looking at this in more detail.

The study followed 45 bumblebees in an arena who chose between walking through an unobstructed, clear path and reaching a feeding area and deviating from this path to fiddle with wooden balls. There was no advantage to rolling the balls, and there is no analogue behavior in the wild that would prompt bees to roll the balls.

Still, all individual bees rolled the balls between 1 and 117 times — a strikingly large number that strongly suggests the bees found pleasure in this activity.

“It is certainly mind-blowing, at times amusing, to watch bumble bees show something like play,” says Samadi Galpayage, a Ph.D. student at the Queen Mary University of London. Galpayage came to the university to do a master’s but fell in love with bees and stayed to do a PhD and learn more about them. “They approach and manipulate these ‘toys’ again and again. It goes to show, once more, that despite their little size and tiny brains, they are more than small robotic beings.”

“They may actually experience some kind of positive emotional states, even if rudimentary, like other larger fluffy, or not so fluffy, animals do. This sort of finding has implications to our understanding of sentience and welfare of insects and will, hopefully, encourage us to respect and protect life on Earth evermore.”

The researchers also carried out another experiment where another 42 bees went into one of two colored chambers: one with movable balls and one without any object. Bees consistently showed a preference for the color of the chamber previously associated with wooden balls. The experiments also highlight that young bees are more likely to roll the balls than older bees, something that is consistent with mammals, where playing behavior often changes with age.

Chittka suspects that playful behavior in bees could serve a role similar to those in humans or mammals, offering important practice for coordination and strengthening neural connections associated with muscle coordination.

“This research provides a strong indication that insect minds are far more sophisticated than we might imagine. There are lots of animals who play just for the purposes of enjoyment, but most examples come from young mammals and birds,” says Chitta. “We are producing ever-increasing amounts of evidence backing up the need to do all we can to protect insects that are a million miles from the mindless, unfeeling creatures they are traditionally believed to be.”

The paper was praised by other researchers, although some experts say more research is needed to show if this is truly play and not a behavior associated with something that bees would do in the nest, like clearing debris. There’s also a question of whether bees would do this in the wild — in the lab, bees are safe from predators and don’t have to work as hard for food as they would in the wild, so it’s not clear if spending physical resources to play would be rewarding enough.

But this is striking nonetheless. Far from being the mindless automatons some considered them to be, bees exhibit complex and enticing behaviors, hinting at a mind that is remarkably capable of complex cognitive and social behaviors. For Chittka himself, it wouldn’t be the first time he’s discovered something remarkable about bees, improving our understanding of these fuzzy little friends and hopefully, making us more willing to protect them.

Bee populations are dwindling, largely because of our use of pesticides and habitat fragmentation. Bees have fewer and fewer spots where they can forage and find resources. This, however, is a problem where we can all make a difference: by planting bee-friendly flowers, even in urbanized areas, we can help offer bees a respite they desperately need.

The study was published in the journal Animal Behavior.