I'll Bee There for You: Do Insects Feel Emotions?

     This article starts out mentioning a book written by Charles Darwin titled The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animal. In this book Darwin stated that insects "express anger, terror, jealousy and love." Nearly a hundred and fifty years later, this article explains that Darwin may have actually been onto something. Because bee's are incapable of expressing themselves by describing their emotions, the article states that researchers "look for evidence that the insects have the cognitive, behavioral and psychological building blocks that, when combined, can give rise to a complex phenomenon like emotion."
     An experiment was done by biologist Clint Perry of Queen Mary, University of London. Him and his co-workers trained bumblebees to be able to distinguish between a blue flower on the left side of a container and a green flower on the right. The blue flower contained a thirty percent sugar solution while the green flower had only unsweetened water. The bees were able to associate and recognize that the blue flower yielded the sugary solution. They then tested bee's on a single blue-green flower. Before releasing the bees near the flower, half of them were given a sixty percent sugary substance and the other half were not. The scientists noticed that when the bees were released, the half that had been given the sugar prior to the test flew must faster toward the blueish green colored flower than those bees that had not been given the sugar.

     Following the experiment to make sure that the bees weren't reacting this way as a result of a sugar high, they conducted the same experiment with different colors and types of flowers. The bees only reacted this way when the flowers were blue, green or somewhere in between.
     According to the article, the reason why the sugar amped bees flew faster toward the flower is because of something called optimism bias, which is the assumption that an ambiguous stimulus contains a reward. Perry's experiment suggests that those bees who had been given the sugar were more optimistic. The article explains that humans react the same way as well. Infants cry less if offered candy or something sweet. Sometimes adults cope with sadness with a peace of dark chocolate from their stash.
    This article was very interesting to me because I personally have wondered whither or not insects feel anything emotionally. I have actually worked for a pest control company before and have never had an issue killing insects because they've always creeped me out and I have never thought that they were ever emotionally "aware". But, this experiment is interesting to me because it suggests otherwise. The results yielded from the experiment give evidence that insects are much more aware than I thought. This experiment definitely has application to society as a whole because if people took the time to research this, maybe they would think twice about killing all insects that they come in contact with. Bees pollinate a very large percentage of crop in the world and are therefore very important to human life. This information could help bees to never face the possibility of extinction.
     I also thought that this article was very interesting because in my opinion, the expirements conducted were extremely ingenious. When i've wondered in the past whither or not insects have feelings, i've just always concluded that we will never know and there's no way to tell. But all it takes is someone thinking outside the box and conducting experiments and new theories and evidences are produced. This was a very interesting article to me and i'm glad I chose it.

Original Article: Jason G. Goldman
Article Response: Chad Barlow