Bees — cognition and use

Bees are where the moral imagination of many people first stalls. A cow has a face; a fish, with effort, has a face. A honeybee is small, numerous, and housed in a structure that looks, from outside, like furniture. The case for taking bees seriously as individuals has been built up slowly, in laboratories in Berlin, Toulouse, Canberra, and London, over the last forty years. It is now one of the most striking bodies of work in animal cognition.

What bees can do

Lars Chittka’s The Mind of a Bee (Chittka, 2022) collects the experimental record. Honeybees and bumblebees learn colours, patterns, scents, and spatial layouts, and they do so flexibly — updating their behaviour when a reward disappears and when new ones appear. They navigate by a solar compass corrected for time of day, integrate path length across kilometre-scale foraging trips, and communicate the location of food to nestmates through the waggle dance, a symbolic code decoded by Karl von Frisch in the 1940s and still one of the only known examples of non-human symbolic communication about distant things.

Beyond associative learning, bees have been shown to grasp abstract relational concepts. Giurfa and colleagues (2001) trained honeybees on a delayed match-to-sample task — bees learned to pick, from two options, the stimulus that matched a previously presented cue, and then transferred that rule across modalities, from colours to patterns and from visual to olfactory stimuli. The authors concluded that “sameness” and “difference” are within the conceptual reach of an insect.

Adrian Dyer’s line of work (Dyer, 2012, building on earlier 2008 reviews) demonstrated that individual bees differ from one another on cognitive tasks, that they can learn to recognise human faces from photographs, and that their visual processing is shaped by experience in ways that make the “simple reflex machine” picture of an insect impossible to sustain.

Solvi, Al-Khudhairy, and Chittka (2020), writing in Science, showed that bumblebees can recognise objects across senses — a bee that had only felt a shape in the dark could later pick it out by sight, and vice versa. Cross-modal object recognition had previously been documented only in vertebrates. Other work from the Chittka lab has reported tool use, observational learning from trained conspecifics, and behavioural signatures consistent with something like optimism and pessimism after positive or negative events.

None of this proves bees have rich subjective experience. It does mean, as the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness (2024) put it for insects more broadly, that conscious experience is a realistic possibility that science can no longer ignore.

Industrial beekeeping

Modern apiculture has little in common with the backyard skep of folklore. In commercial honey production, queens are often bred in specialised operations and shipped by post. Wing clipping — trimming one of a queen’s wings so she cannot leave with a swarm — is a standard management practice in many operations, effectively immobilising her reproductively. Queens are frequently replaced every one or two years, well short of a honeybee queen’s potential lifespan of several years, on the grounds that younger queens lay more eggs.

Artificial insemination of queens, using CO2 anaesthesia and instruments that introduce pooled semen collected from decapitated drones, is used in breeding programs to fix desired traits — gentle temperament, hygienic behaviour, productivity. Honey is harvested by removing frames and, in many operations, replacing the bees’ winter food stores with sugar syrup, which is cheaper per calorie than the honey they made.

Colonies are routinely transported by truck across continents for commercial pollination. In the United States, roughly two-thirds of all managed honeybee colonies are moved to California each February to pollinate the almond crop, the single largest pollination event on Earth (Bond, Plattner, and Hunt, 2014). Long-distance trucking exposes colonies to heat, cold, vibration, disrupted foraging, and accelerated disease transmission through mixing with other operations’ bees. Annual colony loss in managed US honeybees has run between roughly 30 and 50 percent for more than a decade, a rate the Bee Informed Partnership and allied researchers describe as unsustainable by any normal agricultural standard (vanEngelsdorp et al., managed-bee health literature).

The drivers of those losses are themselves a systems story. Goulson and colleagues (2015) argue that managed and wild bee declines are driven by combined stress from parasites, notably the Varroa mite, neonicotinoid and other pesticides, and the monoculture landscapes that leave bees with long forage deserts between bloom events. Commercial pollination moves bees into precisely those landscapes on purpose.

Honey and vegan ethics

The Vegan Society, which coined the word in 1944 and maintains its original definition, has excluded honey from a vegan diet from the beginning. Honey is a food produced by animals for themselves; its harvest involves exploitation in the Society’s sense; and the industry behind it raises the welfare concerns above (The Vegan Society).

The case is sometimes presented as a borderline call because honey production can look benign at small scale. But the great majority of honey on supermarket shelves comes from industrial operations, and even small operations typically practise queen replacement, feed substitution, and periodic destructive harvest. The Vegan Society position is not that every keeper is cruel; it is that honey, as a category, is an animal product taken from beings whose interests are not being consulted.

Wild pollinators, bee-friendly, and vegan-labelled

An ecological complication: the honeybee (Apis mellifera) is one of roughly 20,000 bee species worldwide. Wild bees — bumblebees, solitary bees, stingless bees — do most of the pollination in most ecosystems and a large share of the pollination of many crops. The IPBES Pollinators Assessment (2016) found that around 40 percent of invertebrate pollinator species, especially bees and butterflies, are threatened with extinction, driven by habitat loss, pesticide use, pathogens, invasive species, and climate change. Gallai and colleagues (2009) estimated the economic value of insect pollination to world agriculture at roughly 153 billion euros per year.

Dense populations of managed honeybees can compete with wild bees for forage and transmit pathogens into wild populations, meaning that “save the bees” campaigns centred on beekeeping can, in some contexts, displace rather than support the pollinators most at risk.

This produces a small but important labelling confusion. A product marked bee-friendly usually means it was grown without pollinator-harming pesticides, or that a portion of proceeds supports pollinator habitat. A product marked vegan means it contains no animal-derived ingredients, honey included. The two claims overlap at their edges — both push toward landscapes with more flowers and fewer poisons — but they are not the same claim, and neither is a guarantee of the other.

For veganism, the practical pattern is legible. Avoid honey, beeswax-based products where plant alternatives exist, and royal jelly and propolis supplements. Support wild-pollinator habitat, pesticide reform, and diverse plantings. Treat the honeybee not as the mascot of pollination but as one managed species among many, and as a mind in its own right.

See also

• Animals — the pillar this article sits within.
• Sentience — the graded scientific picture of animal minds, including invertebrates.
• Biodiversity and animal agriculture — the wider ecological context in which pollinator declines sit.