Bumblebees play with balls just for fun, study finds

Bumblebees, it appears, are quite playful — especially when they're young.

A new study out of the U.K. found that if you give bumblebees tiny wooden balls, they'll spend time moving them around, seemingly just for fun. And the younger the bee, the more time they spend playing. 

"We think it's rewarding," bee researcher Samadi Galpayage told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. "There's more to bees than just being pollinators. They have really interesting behaviours, actually, and they're quite clever little creatures."

Galpayage, a PhD student at Queen Mary University's Bee Sensory and Behavioural Sciences Lab in London, is the first author of a new study into the phenomenon. The findings were published last month in the journal Animal Behaviour. 

The researchers stumbled upon the behaviour while working on a different study, in which they trained bees to push balls in exchange for sugary treats. 

But they noticed the playful pollinators kept on pushing the balls around even when they weren't getting rewarded. 

"We saw this phenomenon and we wondered: What's happening here? Why are the bees doing this? Are there specific bees that are doing this? Do they do this repeatedly?" Galpayage said.

"And so we designed these new series of experiments to test whether this could be something like play."

In the new study, 45 bumblebees were given small wooden balls. This time, there was no reward system. The bees also had unrestricted access to an "all-you-can-eat" buffet of sucrose solution and pollen, Galpayage said.

Still — even with no incentives — they played.

Here's how it looks: A bee, Galpayage said, walks toward a ball and places its two front legs on it. Then, it rotates the ball until it's holding it in all six legs, almost as if hugging it.

Once the bee has a good grip on the ball, it scoots backwards on its butt and pulls the ball towards itself, rotating it along the way. 

"Of course, I have to be objective," Galpayage said. "But, of course … I can't help but feeling amused by it."

WATCH | Bumblebees at play: