The Mind of a Bee
Huck Distinguished Lecture Series

Abstract:
Most of us are aware of the hive mind—the power of bees as an amazing collective. But do we know how uniquely intelligent bees are as individuals? I argue that they have remarkable navigational abilities, can recognize not just flowers but also human faces, exhibit basic emotions, count, use simple tools, solve problems, and learn by observing others. They may even possess consciousness. I illustrate how bee brains are unparalleled in the animal kingdom in terms of how much computing power is packed into their tiny nervous systems. I examine the psychological differences between bees and the ethical dilemmas that arise in conservation and laboratory settings because bees might feel and think.

About the Speaker:
Lars Chittka FRS, Hon.FRES, FLS, MAE is the author of the book The Mind of a Bee and Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary College of the University of London. He is also the founder of the Research Centre for Psychology at Queen Mary. He is known for his work on the evolution of sensory systems and cognition using insect-flower interactions as a model system. Chittka has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of animal cognition and its impact on evolutionary fitness studying bumblebees and honeybees. His main discoveries, published in over 250 articles, concern the evolution of colour vision in bees, and their surprising cognitive abilities, for example numerosity, attention, speed-accuracy trade-offs in decision making, false memories, emotion-like states, the social learning of object manipulation skills in bees and the exploration of consciousness from a variety of perspectives. Chittka is a recipient of the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award and an Advanced Fellowship from the European Research Council (ERC). He is also member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, an elected Fellow of the Linnean Society (FLS), the Royal Entomological Society (FRES) as well as the Royal Society of Biology (FRSB). He has been an editor of biology’s foremost open access journal PLoS Biology since 2004 and a Chairman of a panel of Europe's most prestigious funding agency, the European Research Council’s (ERC, in 2011 and 2013). Chittka has been involved in a number of collaborative works linking the science of bees with music and art. With his band Killer Bee Queens, he released a concept album entitled Strange Flowers, in which all song lyrics are inspired by the world of bees.

Contact

  Heather Hines
  hmh19@psu.edu