Emotions in Honey Bees
Emotions in organisms other than people is a controversial topic to some. Much depends on the definition of an "emotion" and then there are the human emotions that arise when it comes to describing people as animals.
This discussion fits in a number of ways with the human-honey bee interface. Take, for instance, the honey bee dance "language." Other topics in the emotional realm might be "telling the bees" when their beekeeper has died, and the idea that bees notice when the beekeeper is not calm in manipulating a colony, resulting in more stings.
A leading figure in the study of honey bee emotions is Dr Zbigniew Lipinski, who has written a volume entitled "Essence and Mechanism of Nest Abandoment by Honeybee Swarms," printed in Poland by Blenam Olsztyn, and published by the author in 2001. It won the gold medal at the 2001 Apimondia Congress in Durban, South Africa.
As always for fuller information, return to the Apis Information Resource Center.
Reader Feedback
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- Dr._Malcolm_Sanford Dr._Malcolm_Sanford Dec 18, 2008 @ 12:22 pm | in reply to marshaltaylor
- We do not know that honey bees can sense human fear; there is the old world custom of "telling the bees" when the beekeeper has died; whether the insects express sadness is not known. see: http://loiszing.blogs.com/artaction/2007/06/what-do-you-nee.html
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- marshaltaylor marshaltaylor Dec 18, 2008 @ 10:58 am
- How do bees react to human emotions. I understand they react to fear, but what about a beekeeper's sadness? Would they react to other emotions of the beekeeper?
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- Dr._Malcolm_Sanford Dr._Malcolm_Sanford Dec 22, 2006 @ 9:37 am
- Anyone interested in this topic and/or wishing more informationshould contact Dr. Lipinski directly <lipinski@sprint.com.pl>. If you find other electronic resources on emotions in insects/animals, let me know.
Malcolm T. Sanford
Further Links of Interest
- PR-bookreview: "Essence and mechanism of nest abandonment by honeybee swarms" by Zbigniew Lipinski
- One can comprehend, that the book deserved the gold medal. Because the author explains in his book not only his new theory on swarming of honeybees, but it flows also a rich experience treasure into it, as well as his extensive literature knowledge.
He speaks about the effort to solve the mystery of swarming in our beloved honeybees, but is conscious, that only 1 % of the behaviour of the bees is actually known and documented by scientists. - Journal of Apicultural Science
- A journal containing Dr. Lipinski's recent papers.
- Emotion in animals - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Emotion in animals considers the question whether non human animals feel in the sense humans understand it.
Different answers have been suggested throughout human history, by animal lovers, scientists, philosophers, and others who interact with animals, but the core question has proven hard to answer since we can neither obtain spoken answers, nor assume anthropomorphism. - The Elusive Honey Bee Dance "Language" Hypothesis
- The Elusive Honey Bee Dance "Language" Hypothesis: Journal of Insect Behavior, Vol. 15, No. 6, November 2002 - Pages 859-878.
- American Scientist Online - The Nature of Emotions
- What is an emotion? More than 90 definitions have been offered over the past century, and there are almost as many theories of emotion?not to mention a complex array of overlapping words in our languages to describe them. Plutchik offers an integrative theory based on evolutionary principles. Emotions are adaptive?in fact, they have a complexity born of a long evolutionary history?and although we conceive of emotions as feeling states, Robert Plutchik says the feeling state is part of a process involving both cognition and behavior and containing several feedback loops.
