Bees don’t have eyelids, so it’s not that easy to tell whether bees are asleep or not. However, their antennae stop moving and they rest their heads on the floor, and in some cases, fall over sideways, so they do definitely sleep. Bees often hold each other’s feet while they sleep to stop them from falling off the honeycomb.
Forager bees, who spend all day fetching nectar and pollen, need to make the most of daylight, so they will have a day-night sleep pattern, while other bees will take shifts and have micro-naps regardless of day or night. If it is too noisy in the hive, then bees sometimes have a quick nap in a flower.
Scientists tested what happens to sleep-deprived bees and it turns out their waggle dancing becomes a bit random, they get lost more often when out foraging, and they find it harder to find their way back to the hive.
Bees seem to sleep the same regardless of how far they have flown, so scientists wondered whether sleep is actually more about consolidating their memories, rather than physical recovery. They tested this by first training bees to recognise a specific smell, and then exposed them to the same smell while they were asleep. Then they tested the bees’ ability to remember the smell, and the ones who were ‘trained’ in their sleep remembered the smell better than bees who weren’t. In theory, this means the smell activates their memory while they sleep, which then reinforces what they learned.
This proves their brains are active while they sleep, and that sleep is important for consolidating memories, but apart from that, not really sure what use this information is?
The next question is whether bees dream, but no one seems to have come up with an experiment to test this. It turns out bees don’t have REM sleep, which is when humans dream most, but humans also dream in deep sleep, so in theory, bees could also dream in deep sleep. When humans dream in deep sleep, the dreams are very simple, usually just involving single objects. Someone actually wrote a paper suggesting that if bees dream, the dreams are probably about simple objects, like flowers.
So bees might dream of flowers.
