Ep. 598 - How Bees Learn & Remember Flowers

Matt Candeias (0:00)

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Hello everyone and welcome to the In Defense of Plants Podcast, the official podcast of indefenseofplants.com. What's up? This is your host, Matt. Welcome to the show. How is everyone doing this week? I'm doing great because we are talking about the world of bee cognition today. How bees view the world and why they visit different flowers is a really important topic in ecology, as you might imagine. It's also really important from the plants perspective, who are not passive in any of this. Plants have their own reason to attract bees and the interplay between those two worlds is absolutely fascinating to try to get your head wrapped around. Joining us to talk about this is Dr. Felicity Muth, who's currently working with the National Geographic Wildlife Intelligence Grant to help us understand the world of bumblebee cognition and what that means for plants. As you're going to hear, cognition is a challenging thing to study, but it can tell us a lot about the world we see around us. So I don't want to keep you from this information any longer. Let's just jump right into it. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Felicity Muth. I hope you enjoy.

All right, Dr. Felicity Muth. Welcome to the podcast. It is absolutely wonderful to have you here. Let's start off with an introduction.

Felicity Muth (2:03)

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. So yeah, I'm Felicity Muth. I'm an associate professor at University of California at Davis.

I study animal behavior and in particular, bumblebee cognition.

Matt Candeias (2:17)

Excellent. What brought you to this world? That is a fascinating journey in and of itself, I'm sure.

Felicity Muth (2:23)

Yeah. I think my path is actually pretty boring and that it was highly predictable from a young age.

I was reading animal behavior books like the classics like Lorenz and Timberlain and stuff when I was a young teenager.

And then I remember a conversation with somebody when I was in high school, where she told me that she was going to go and study animal behavior at university. And I remember just thinking, wow, I did not know that was an option in terms of a degree. And so then I basically just copied her and applied for zoology and animal behavior degrees, and had basically followed that track since then. My PhD, I originally worked on nest construction and birds, but from a cognitive perspective. And then towards the end of my PhD, I mean, I always loved insects. And kind of for various reasons, I decided I really wanted to switch to insect cognition, which took me to bumblebees, which I've been working with for god, a wee while now, 15 years or so.

Matt Candeias (3:30)

Nice. And so, yeah, cognition and insects. I was talking to a friend today, and they're not in the science world at all. And I was like, oh, I get to talk to bee behavioral ecologists today. And they were like, wait, they're insects. Well, they must have a pretty boring day. It's not that much. And I was like, oh, you don't even know the beginning of it. And that's what I really appreciate about the work is shining light on these organisms that I think people kind of look at as sort of robotic or maybe too small to have much going on upstairs. But your work is proof that it couldn't be further from the case.

Felicity Muth (4:00)

Yeah, it's funny. You know, I feel like when I'm chatting to people who aren't scientists, there's kind of two responses. One of them is like, what? Bees have cognition. And then the second one is, oh, I've heard bees are really smart. And so I think that both kind of viewpoints are out there. You know, cognition is this word that people use in different ways. So I think there are some people that would say that only humans have cognition or only primates have cognition, and they would have very kind of specific criteria, like you have to have language.