9/13/2023 0 Comments Bumbled bees![]() It goes to show, once more, that despite their little size and tiny brains, they are more than small robotic beings. They approach and manipulate these ‘toys’ again and again. Samadi Galpayage, first author on the study and PhD student at Queen Mary University of London said: “It is certainly mind-blowing, at times amusing, to watch bumble bees show something like play. The new research demonstrated that the bees rolling balls repeatedly without being trained and without receiving any food for doing so - it was voluntary and spontaneous - therefore akin to play behavior as seen in other animals. During the previous experiment, the team observed that bumble bees rolled balls outside of the experiment, without getting any food reward. The study expands on earlier work from the same Queen Mary lab that showed that bumble bees can be trained to score goals by rolling a balls to targets in exchange for a sugary food reward. Rolling balls did not contribute to survival strategies, such as gaining food, clearing clutter, or mating and was done under stress-free conditions. The set-up of the experiments removed any notion that the bees were moving the balls for any greater purpose other than play. When tested later and given a choice between the two chambers, neither containing balls at the time, bees showed a preference for the color of the chamber previously associated with the wooden balls. One chamber always contained movable balls, while the other one did not have any objects. This was further supported by another experiment where a different set of 42 bees was given access to two colored chambers. The repeated behavior suggested that ball-rolling was rewarding. Individual bees rolled balls between 1 and, impressively, 117 times over the experiment. They were given the option of walking through an unobstructed path to reach a feeding area or deviating from this path into the areas with wooden balls. Forty-five bumble bees were followed in the study as they went through an arena.
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