Bumblebees like to play soccer, did you know?

As real footballers, bumblebees, male and female, participating in a first round of the mixed championship they have been labeled with numbers attached to the back of each so as to be easily recognizable during the experimental games played with wooden balls supplied in different colors. The players, exiting the hive, found themselves going through a short plastic tunnel at the end of which they could enter the playing arena and choose between a field to their right with moving balls and a second field to their left with other balls. mobile or glued to the floor (depending on the experimental conditions) or they could continue straight to the end of the arena where pollen and sugar solution were made available at will. Experimental games were played for three hours a day in leagues with an overall length of up to 18 days and they were all filmed by the researchers to monitor the behavior of the players, who were very active, especially the younger individuals and males (but is there really any surprise?), with up to 44 passes over a maximum distance of 600 millimeters (which are many for a bumblebee) in a single experimental day. The analysis of the recorded video frames shows how the bumblebees (very tender) approach the ball from the front, touch it initially with their front legsi, then cling to it with all legs and then start rolling it around until they get tired of that ball to move on to another.

It’s a pleasure

The particularly interesting aspect of classifying this behavior as an actual game is that the bumblebees chose to interact with the balls, preferring the mobile ones and intentionally deviating from the straight path towards the pollen or sugar solution, furthermore they didn’t seem to roll the balls to get food, tidy them up or mate. This type of interaction with an inanimate object without an apparent precise purpose is somewhat similar to that already observed and much studied in macaqueswho collect, transport, rub, roll and turn stones, or in otters, who perform in real juggling shows with up to three stones at the same time.

Girls Just Want to Have Fun

A separate league, all female, was subsequently played with the aim of understanding whether playing ball was in itself, as every game should be, a pleasant activity: for this reason, a first phase involved training in playing fields of different colors, blue or yellow (both colors that the bumblebees can distinguish well) with or without balls, which had to be crossed in the path from the hive to the food and during a second phase the players were offered the choice between the yellow and the blue playing field. Surprisingly, the female bumblebees of this second experiment preferred the color playing field where they remembered having had balls to roll during the training phase, demonstrating how the simple activity of the game could reinforce the choice, as it is rewarding in itself.

The useful game

Now, it is legitimate to ask why bumblebees should be interested and perhaps even like the game of ball and the answer could be related to theirs principal occupation of pollinators, oroccupation for which it is necessary to develop, maintain and possibly improve over time cognitive and motor skills (for handling flowers, extracting pollen and nectar) that are not very different from those involved in handling a ball with their six legs. In addition, the greater propensity to play shown by younger individuals, between 3 and 7 days old, could be linked to a improvement of neuronal connections thanks to an initial period of particular plasticity of some brain areas, the fungiform bodies, responsible for the formation of memories and the processing of sensory information. In other words, bumblebees not only have fun playing but they also prepare for all the flowers of the future (and they help us humans to understand a little more about insect brains, which is perhaps more complicated than we think).

So now, even among bumblebees, females will be able to sing the famous verses of the song by Rita Pavone “Why, why / on Sundays you always leave me alone / to go and see the match / football / why, why / once you don’t take me too?”, Allowing even female recriminations to make the infamous leap of species.