Sometimes we tend to think of social insects like bees or ants as miserable, almost robotic creatures, doomed to work for their queens without questioning orders. But they also have their little hearts and they harbor feelings ; at least that of optimism, as can be seen from a curious study carried out by scientists from Queen Mary University in London and which has been echoed in the journal Science .
The researchers carried out the experiment with 24 bumblebees, which they trained to enter a chamber where there were two doors: the green one led to a container with water and the blue one, to a liquid with food . Of course, they preferred the latter.
But then they repeated the test with a blue-green door. Before releasing them to see how they reacted, half of the bumblebees were “doped” with a drop of water that contained a high concentration of sugar , the equivalent of a chocolate. These were the ones who hurried to the ambiguous destination the fastest; that is, they were more optimistic than their peers.
The scientists ruled out that the sugar “rush” simply gave them more energy, because then they all went just as quickly to the blue rooms , where they positively knew there was food.
They also found that the dose of sugar encouraged them to quickly escape a trap similar to those of spiders. If they blocked the secretion of the neurotransmitter dopamine, linked in humans to the brain’s reward circuits, the bumblebees were not as spirited .
This shows that emotions such as good humor and optimism are produced in nervous systems as elementary – in comparison to ours – as that of insects, and that their evolutionary origin is very remote .
