Annette McGivney – When Stephen Buchmann finds a wayward bee on a window inside his Tucson, Arizona, home, he goes to great lengths to capture and release it unharmed. Using a container, he carefully traps the bee against the glass before walking to his garden and placing it on a flower to recuperate.

Buchmann’s kindness – he is a pollination ecologist who has studied bees for over 40 years – is about more than just returning the insect to its desert ecosystem. It’s also because Buchmann believes that bees have complex feelings, and he’s gathered the science to prove it.

This March, Buchmann released a book that unpacks just how varied and powerful a bee’s mind really is. The book, What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories and Personalities of Bees, draws from his own research and dozens of other studies to paint a remarkable picture of bee behavior and psychology.

It argues that bees can demonstrate sophisticated emotions resembling optimism, frustration, playfulness and fear, traits more commonly associated with mammals. Experiments have shown bees can experience PTSD-like symptoms, recognize different human faces, process long-term memories while sleeping, and maybe even dream.

Buchmann is part of a small but growing group of scientists doing what he calls “fringe” research seeking to understand the full emotional capacity of bees. His research has radically changed the way he relates to the insects – not only does he now avoid killing them in his house, he has also significantly reduced lethal and insensitive treatment of specimens for his research.

“Two decades ago, I might have treated a bee differently,” Buchmann says.

The new field of study could have significant implications for agriculture, an industry where bees are critical. That’s because approximately one-third of the American diet, including many fruits, vegetables and nuts, relies on bees for pollination. In the past, bee research has focused on their role in crop pollination, but the work being pioneered by Buchmann and his contemporaries could force an ethical reckoning with how the animals are treated.

Commercially managed bees are considered livestock by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), and are treated as a workhorse for food production, just as cattle in feedlots serve the beef industry. This mechanized approach to pollination makes no allowances for the kinds of revelations about bees’ emotional lives that scientists like Buchmann have recently discovered.

“Bees are self-aware, they’re sentient, and they possibly have a primitive form of consciousness,” writes Buchmann. “They solve problems and can think. Bees may even have a primitive form of subjective experiences.”

Evidence supporting insect sentience offers clues to what may be driving “colony collapse disorder”, in which entire honeybee hives die within a single season – a phenomenon that has caused the population of these essential pollinators to precipitously drop over the last two decades. While the cause has been primarily attributed to pesticide use, Buchmann and other scientists argue the decline is also due to psychological stress caused by the brutal practices of industrialized agriculture.

Their work is raising practical and existential quandaries. Can large-scale agriculture and scientific research continue without causing bees to suffer, and is the dominant western culture even capable of accepting that the tiniest of creatures have feelings, too? Buchmann hopes an ethical shift will happen as details about the emotional lives of invertebrates – especially bees – are shared with the public.

“We are blasting bees with huge amounts of agrichemicals and destroying their natural foraging habitats,” says Buchmann. “Once people accept that bees are sentient and can suffer, I think attitudes will change.”