One of the most fascinating scientific stories that has been told to me is the discovery of a kind of internal clock specific to bees, allowing them to sense time passing. This story was reminded to me recently by Tom Lum, a researcher from the Scratch Foundation in New York (USA) who works on the perception of time.
In 1929, Ingeborg Beling (1904-1988) German ethologist and her colleagues wondered if bees were able to detect the passage of time. With a first fairly simple experiment: they took a hive in front of which they placed sugar water daily, at the same time (4 p.m. sharp). After a while, they stopped handling them before noticing that the apoid insects still came out of their shelter every day at 4 p.m., so without the presence of sugar water. For them, no doubt: bees do have an internal clock. A conclusion may be a bit quick, other factors could explain this regularity, for example, the position of the Sun in the sky which would help them to orient themselves.
To verify this hypothesis, the German scientists therefore reproduced the experiment, but this time in complete darkness. Same outcome: the bees still came out at 4 p.m., which surely confirmed that they have this ability to measure time. Not so fast! Other factors put forward include the possibility that the insects simply sense the differences in heat over the course of a day, which would lead them to such punctuality. It took a few years, precisely in 1932, for another Munich team, led by Oskar Wahl, to repeat the experiment, but this time underground and in a salt mine. No light, no heat, nothing. And again, they continued to come out at the same time! End of the discussion ? Were we sure that bees perceive the passage of time? The riddles of nature that may seem trivial sometimes remain mysterious for a long time.
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Bees and their internal clock
Skeptics continued to push the cork: don’t the little workers react like this because they are measuring the rotation of the Earth, even a magnetic field? It was with the democratization of air transport in 1960 that Max Renner, still from the University Institute of Zoology in Munich, had a bright idea: he too trained bees to leave their hive at 4 p.m. but in Paris for make the same observation (with or without sugar water), then he brought it by plane to… New York. Result ? The little beasts did not lose their regularity as they ventured outside but this time at 10 am. In short, they were “jet laggées”! And in this way, no one today disputes the idea that they have an internal clock.
If I had fun describing these experiments in detail, it’s because recently, a perception of science has set in, describing it as cold, methodical and unemotional. The scientist is described as a technocrat and a prisoner of his tools. On the contrary, with this little story drawn from ethology, I would like to re-enchant the vision of the scientific method because all these works reveal its own essence: curiosity, inventiveness, fascination with nature. Isn’t it necessary a certain abnegation to carry out these experiments, to rent a salt mine or to borrow planes? The scientist is not a cold-blooded animal and, on the contrary, can be a real poet in his approach by carrying out an almost artisanal work of repeating evidence. Likewise, he’s going to spend a hell of a time explaining gravity when we all have an intuitive sense of how it works: if I throw something up in the air, it’s going to fall down. And do we really need poets to describe what love is or to put into words the emotions we feel in front of the beauty of nature? Not really. What the poet and the scientist are trying to do is to describe the world around us in such an absolute way that it cannot be denied. Both deserve to go down in the history books for these revelations. And, beautiful irony, in the end, it is nature that “wins” from their work.
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