Back in 2008, the bees in Lars Chittka’s honey bee (Apis mellifera) laboratory at Queens University of London started behaving as if they were seeing ghosts. In the Chittka lab, bees are housed together in dark, artificial nests meant to mimic the conditions of the natural cavities where they typically build their hives. For behavioral experiments, the insects are usually transferred via a long tube one by one into small arenas where they learn to perform complex tasks such as counting and classifying objects into distinct categories.
In Chittka’s study, bees foraged in a meadow of yellow and white artificial flowers—hand-sized squares where they would encounter a sucrose-filled syringe. There was a chance that when they approached a flower, however, they would be briefly caught by a soft, mechanical claw made of foam. This brief interaction mimicked capture by one of the bees’ natural predators: crab spiders (Misumena vatia). While ...
