The bees and the birds, like us only
Among the elements that constitute the homo sapiens’ self-definition, there is one that is often ignored. Human beings have an unending capacity for narcissistic conceit. The “inner life”, it has long been believed, is the province of very few animals. With reluctance, people acknowledge that “higher mammals” — elephants, primates, dolphins and some whales — are worth empathy. For lowly insects, though, the fascination is rarely with the individual. The ant colony and beehive are marvellous for their complexity, but the ant and the bee are merely constituents of a collective. It turns out that behind their exoskeletons, bees might be a lot more complex than people thought. A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that in certain settings, bumblebees react to certain tastes in seemingly similar ways to some mammals, including human babies — they seem to like sugar water, and retreat from saltiness. Researchers concluded that bees may have a “subjective inner state”. Bees are ready to join the growing ranks of smart non-mammals. Corvids — crows, ravens, etc — use tools, have moods and likes and dislikes. Parrots and their kin have a propensity for languages. Perhaps it’s tough to see these creatures as close kin because they look so different and are seen only in large groups. But then, as the crow or the bee flies and looks down, it might just look at a crowd of humans and not see people at all.
- 1Though not explicitly a governance piece, this editorial connects to India's Biological Diversity Act, 2002, enacted to implement the Convention on Biological Diversity, 1992, which mandates conservation of species, including pollinators like bees, as part of India's constitutional commitment under Article 48A to protect and improve the environment. The Directive Principle in Article 48A, read with the fundamental duty in Article 51A(g), obliges both state and citizens to safeguard wildlife and forests, a framework that extends to insect biodiversity once its ecological and now cognitive significance is recognised.
- 2Internationally, pollinator decline has become a live policy concern, with the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) issuing a landmark 2016 assessment estimating that pollinators like bees contribute to production of crops worth 235 to 577 billion US dollars annually worldwide. Recognising bees' cognitive complexity, as this PNAS study does, adds a welfare dimension to what has traditionally been treated as a purely economic or agricultural policy question in global biodiversity negotiations.
- 3On the legal-regulatory front, animal sentience findings increasingly intersect with animal welfare law; India's Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960, defines 'animal' broadly but its protections have historically centred on vertebrates, and courts, including the Supreme Court in Animal Welfare Board of India v. A. Nagaraja (2014), have read expansive welfare rights for animals under Article 21. Emerging science on insect sentience, as in this PNAS bee study, could eventually inform debates on whether such protections should extend further down the taxonomic scale.
- 4Scientifically, the finding rests on comparative behavioural neuroscience: bumblebees possess roughly one million neurons compared to a human's approximately eighty-six billion, yet the PNAS research suggests complex valenced responses to taste are not necessarily correlated with brain size. This has significant implications for agricultural economics too, since insect pollinators support an estimated 75 percent of the world's leading food crops that depend at least partly on animal pollination, according to widely cited FAO estimates.