Bumblebees Seem to ‘Lick Their Lips’ After Sweet Treats and Shake Their Heads at Bad Tastes, Hinting at the Insects’ Inner Lives

Slow-motion videos suggest that the insects display distinct behaviors when they like or dislike a snack. The findings might offer a new way to study their emotion-like states

Eli Stark-Elster | AAAS Mass Media Fellow

July 10, 2026 11:45 a.m.

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How do you know if a bumblebee is enjoying its meal? Possibly, the same way you would know for a dog—licking its lips.

When bumblebees sip something sweet, they extend and retract their tongues. But consuming unpleasant concoctions leads to shaking their heads and wiping their mouths, researchers reported on July 6 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings suggest that the insects can evaluate foods based on whether they like or dislike the taste, rather than just how useful or harmful they are. Behaviors indicating emotions have long been seen and studied in mammals, but they have been harder to identify in insects.

“Many people are comfortable saying that insects can sense, learn and make decisions,” Fei Peng, a study co-author and bee cognition researcher at Southern Medical University in China, says in a statement. But the idea that insects may find things “pleasant or unpleasant” is more controversial, he says. “Our findings push on that intuition.”

In the study, Peng and colleagues presented buff-tailed bumblebees from 18 colonies with droplets of different flavored waters: plain, sweet, salty and bitter. The team recorded the critters while they drank with their glossas, which are long, tongue-like mouthparts for sipping nectar.

Slow-motion videos revealed that after consuming sugary liquids, bumblebees moved their glossas in and out, as though they were savoring the taste. Meanwhile, bitter and salty liquids led to aversive behaviors like head shaking, mouth wiping and backing away.

Slow-motion footage of bumblebees shows how they react when they 'like' or 'dislike' things

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Though the reactions hinted at something akin to emotional states, the researchers could not rule out the possibility that they were mere reflexes. For instance, humans will raise a leg when it’s been tapped just below the kneecap, hitting the patellar tendon, but that doesn’t mean they like it.

To distinguish whether the bees were displaying something more than reflexes, the team altered the bees’ internal states. In one experiment, they dehydrated the insects by warming them to 104 degrees Fahrenheit. That caused the bees to change their response to the salty water: They extended and retracted their glossas, just as they previously had for the sugary solutions. This reaction, similar to a person enjoying an electrolyte drink on a hot day, suggested that the glossa movements are not fixed responses to specific chemicals but instead depend on what the insects need at the time.

The researchers also manipulated the bees’ brain chemistry. Exposing them to chemicals, including dopamine, that generally motivate animals to seek food made the bees even more eager for sugar. After drinking a sweet solution, however, they did not produce the same glossa movements as before, indicating that they weren’t enjoying the meal more than usual. Additionally, an endocannabinoid chemical, which amplify sensations during rewarding experiences, made the insects less motivated to consume sugar. When they did drink it, however, they showed enhanced positive reactions.

The different effects of these chemicals hint at a distinction between liking and wanting in the insects, according to the team. For instance, an animal can be motivated to consume something without necessarily finding it pleasurable. The findings hint that, like in mammals, the facial movements of bumblebees could provide clues about what’s happening in their heads.

“What this is showing us is that even from an animal like a bee, there is some sort of inner life for that insect,” says study co-author Andrew Barron, who studies neural mechanisms of animal behavior at Macquarie University in Australia, to New Scientist’s James Woodford. “There’s something going on. It’s evaluating its world. It’s experiencing its world, and it’s not a robotic entity running on a program.”

Still, the new findings do not prove that bumblebees feel pleasure or disgust in the same way humans do. The researchers frame the behavior as evidence that the animals assign a positive or negative value to an experience.

Thomas White, an entomologist at the University of Sydney who was not involved in the study, tells the Guardian’s Petra Stock that insect sentience research is “a fast-moving field.” Most work, he notes, has focused on negative states such as pain or fear, but the new work stands out since it looks at the “positive side of life.”

“We underestimate insects so much,” says Jonathan Birch, an animal sentience researcher at the London School of Economics and Political Science who was not involved in the study, to New Scientist. “It’s led to a golden age of very charming studies where scientists use modern techniques—sometimes just high-resolution, high-frame-rate video, as in this study—to reveal behaviors people have been missing.”

Eli Stark-Elster | Read More

Eli Stark-Elster is the AAAS Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellow at Smithsonian magazine. He is a PhD student in evolutionary anthropology at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on documenting the methods used to induce altered states of consciousness across cultures—he conducts fieldwork in southern Africa, where he studies the shamanic use of hallucinogenic plants and fungi. His writing and research has been featured on NPR, Psyche and the Conversation. He also writes on his Substack, Unpublishable Papers.