This post will contain most of the photos from one of my absolute favourite encounters with a bumble bee. It gave me such joy that even when I’m quite old and bald as a cue ball (joking! I’ve been as bald as a cue ball since I was 24!) I think I will still remember this bee encounter quite fondly.
So why is this?
Well, quite simply, it looks like the bee is smiling. And I think she looks so joyful that I find it really, so incredibly heartwarming!
Okay, I can hear someone piping up at the back, even though this is a blogpost and not a lecture, so I’m just going to address what they’re about to say.
I know that the bee isn’t actually smiling, and I know that while it looks like she is smiling to me, to others it might look like she’s angry, and to many others it will look like she has no facial expression whatsoever, and the people who see it that way will be seeing it most accurately. Something about her face just reminds me of a smile. But she’s not smiling.
But I’d like to believe that when I encountered her, she was experiencing joy.
Do bees experience joy? I’ve covered this question before, here, though this post is mainly about goldenrod crab spiders, but I do go into a bit into the subject of beejoy, I’ve coined a new word, there:
The adorable experiment I cited there involved placing bees inside a box containing wooden balls. And the bees started pushing the balls around, despite having no incentive to do so such as a sugar treat. And if anyone watches this video and says it’s not the best video they’ve ever seen, I will know that they are a liar, a goddamn rotten liar:
AHHHHHHH THEY’RE CUTE AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
So, this experiment seems to suggest that bees do experience happiness. Not in the same way we do, sure, I’m sure listening to Rush won’t do anything for the bees, unlike humans, all of whom love listening to Rush, but the experiment does seem to indicate that bees like playing with objects. Maybe to the bees the wooden balls are a sensory toy.
That settles it, not only do bees experience joy, but they’re autistic! And there are two trillion bees on Earth, so we’re the majority. YAAAAAAAAAAY!!!!!!!!!!!
No, despite how cool it would be if bees were autistic, they are not. But let’s get back to to the question of beejoy. Does pushing wooden balls around indicate that bees experience happiness?
It’s complicated.
Just because if humans for example kick a football around, or bounce a basketball, or use a sensory toy ball, just because when humans do this, they are experiencing joy, it does not necessarily mean that bees experience joy when they push wooden balls.
It could be that there is simply a survival advantage to seeking out novel situations, and bees are for want of a better word “programmed” to do so, even though when they do so, they feel nothing. Maybe if a bee’s behaviour is too rigid, they can’t adapt to a world that isn’t always predictable, and so they automatically, without any emotional feeling, seek out new situations.
If it’s an adaptation to help with a world where change is inevitable, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was, it wouldn’t rule out bees experiencing joy. Maybe joy is what causes this behaviour that has a survival advantage.
Why Do I Want Bees To Experience Happiness?
So, why does it matter? Why is it that I want bees to have emotions? Why should it matter to me whether they feel soaring emotional highs as well as crushing lows, or whether they have no more consciousness than a toaster? And also, given that many bees have short lives, and often die in horrible ways, such as being eaten by a goldenrod crab spider, could it not be argued in the other direction, that it would actually be a great mercy if these creatures didn’t experience any emotions?
It would go a great deal to resolving the conflicts discussed in the goldenrod crab spider post if insects and arachnids felt nothing. That way a spider eating a fly would have no more emotional weight than a stone falling on another stone and breaking it. So, where does the desire for animals having feelings come from?
Is It A Desire For Bees And Other Animals To Be Alien, But Not Too Alien?
In my first ever post dealing with wildlife, here it is:
I talked about how the world of wildlife gives me the opportunity to experience the closest thing I will ever get to encountering an alien species. Unless we’re astronomically lucky, no pun intended, and nearby exoplanets not only have life, but life that we have the technology to detect, then the closest we will ever come to meeting an alien is meeting a bird, or an octopus, or a spider, or a bee.
But perhaps I don’t want the alienness do be taken “too far”. Maybe I want a different mind, but not something so different that I can’t even begin to fathom what’s going on in it. Maybe I want to relate to the bee.
Maybe I wanted the bee to be experiencing elation at the beauty of a summer’s day, just like I was.
By the end of this post, I don’t think I will have the answer to why I want these creatures to be alien, but not too alien, a Spock but not a xenomorph perhaps, but I think I’ve figured out part of the reason, and I think what it is is that, I want a world where these creatures are respected, not something that can be just cast aside whenever they inconvenience humans.
And maybe the path towards that is showing the ways in which they are “human”. Maybe it’s to talk about how honeybees have democracy, just like humans do! (At least they’re supposed to.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abk-advcCIw
Or wolf mother spiders carrying their babies on their back, like a human caring for their children! (Granted, humans aren’t known for carrying hundreds of babies on their backs.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw0hmQ7w7ls
Or when humans gain the ability to fly, just like a butterfly! (In a metaphorical sense, you know, gaining self confidence being like flying and all that.)
So, maybe that’s why I want animals to be somewhat like us, so that they will be treated as fellow citizens on this planet, who deserve to be here just as much as us.
Because even if many animals don’t have emotions, many of them do have pain receptors, so it’s still a horrible thing to hurt them.
And even if it were the case that many animals are just “robots”, well, it’s still an awful thing to wipe them out. Earth is an amazing planet, it is the only planet in the universe that definitely, unambiguously has life, and every time we wipe out a species, we are cutting off a piece of what making this planet so beautiful.
But, sometimes I look at it the other way. Sometimes I think we shouldn’t strive to get people to cherish animals because of how human they are. I often wonder is the way forward to get people to a point where they cherish whatever is the most alien creature on Earth, whichever one is the most different from us, because, my hope is, and it’s just a hope, that if we can have at least respect for whatever creature on Earth is not like us at all, then, the differences between humans that divide us, will seem like nothing at all by comparison.
But it’s just a hope. Here’s one last picture of the gorgeous bee!
Ponderings Of An Autist 