Researchers and philosophers fiercely debate what exactly culture is and whether non-human animals have it in some form, but one widely used definition is that culture involves shared, learned behavioural traditions which persist in a population over time. Alice Bridges’ PhD project was to investigate whether bees have culture under this definition. In this study, she painstakingly taught individual bees how to open a “puzzlebox” to get food, then returned them to their colonies. She showed that their untaught nest-mates picked up this behaviour by watching them. The box-opening skill spread through the colony and continued even after the original “demonstrator” bees had died. There’s no reason to suppose that new bees couldn’t learn from these second-generation learners so, hypothetically, box-opening could persist indefinitely.

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Crucially, there were two possible ways to open the box, but learner bees were almost always faithful to the method used by their “demonstrator”, so each colony wound up with its own distinctive way of doing things. Even after some bees discovered the alternative method for themselves, they went back to doing it the way they were taught. In another experiment, four demonstrators were introduced to the colony, two trained with each method. In the end, one method became dominant throughout the colony while the other went extinct, apparently due to chance variation in how enthusiastic the demonstrators were, how quickly they died and so on.

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This all suggests that purely arbitrary cultural traditions can become fixed in bee colonies and persist for long periods. The life cycle of bumblebees means that only queens survive across multiple seasons, so there is probably little chance of multi-generational cultural traditions being maintained in bumblebees as they are in humans, but it opens up the interesting possibility that there might be other insect species with something we’d recognize as culture.

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I didn’t play a huge role in this one, mainly advising on how to analyse the data and report on the results, but it’s been great fun working with Alice and watching her ideas develop over the past few years.