Ejercicio Grupo A - 3 · Inglés PAU Canarias Julio 2023

‘Bees are really highly intelligent’

You may be surprised to discover just how much bees know. “We have suggestive evidence that there

is some level of conscious awareness in bees – that they have emotion-like states,” says Lars Chittka,

professor of sensory and behavioural ecology at Queen Mary University of London.

Chittka has been studying bees for 30 years and is considered one of the world’s leading experts on bee

5 sensory systems and cognition.

In his latest book, The Mind of a Bee, he argues that bees need our protection, not just because they are

useful for crop pollination and biodiversity, but because they may be *sentient beings – and humans have

an ethical obligation to ensure their survival.

“Our work and that of other labs has shown that bees are really highly intelligent individuals. They can

10 count, recognise images of human faces and learn abstract concepts and how to use simple tools.”

Chittka thinks bees have emotions, can plan and imagine things, and can recognise themselves as unique

entities distinct from other bees. He draws these conclusions from experiments in his lab with female

worker bees. “Whenever a bee gets something right, she gets a sugar reward. That’s how we train them,

for example, to recognise human faces.” In one experiment, bees that were shown several monochrome

15 images of human faces learned that one is associated with a sugar reward. “Then, we give them a choice

of different faces and no rewards, and ask: which one do you choose now? And indeed, they can find the

correct one out of a group of different faces.”

In another experiment, the bees were trained to fly past three identical landmarks to get food. “When we

increased or decreased the number of landmarks over the same distance, the bees tended to land earlier or

20 later than before, so they were using the number of landmarks to say: ah ha, I’ve flown far enough, this is

a good place to land. The fact that the landmarks were all exactly the same demonstrated that the bees

really could only get the solution by counting the number of landmarks.”

Chittka started wondering whether such intelligent creatures had feelings so he designed an experiment

where bees suffered a simulated spider attack when they landed on a flower. Afterwards, “they became,

25 overall, very reluctant to land on flowers, and sometimes rejected them even if they saw there was no

spider present. This indicated to us a negative emotion-like state.”

Dr Jonathan Birch is leading a project on animal sentience at the London School of Economics: “My own

view is that it’s very likely that bees are sentient. More evidence is needed,” he said, “but in the past,

academics have not bothered to even ask these questions about insects. And now they are starting to.”

Fragment adapted from The Observer, July 2022

* sentient: able to have feelings

3. Find a word or expression in the text that means... [1 point]

a)

decide future actions (lines 11-17)

b)

recompense (lines 11-17)

c)

sufficient (lines 18-29)

d)

probable (lines 18-29)