Bumblebees Lick Their Lips When They Like Something. They Shake Their Heads When They Don't.

A bumblebee tastes something sweet and does what you'd do: licks its lips. Give it something bitter and it shakes its head and wipes its mouth. A bee. Making faces.

The finding comes from a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where slow-motion footage caught bumblebees repeatedly extending their tongues after sugary drinks, something close to a lip-lick, while salty or bitter liquids triggered a completely different reaction: head shaking, mouth wiping, backing off. That kind of visible, readable reaction has been used for years to study emotional states in mammals. This is the first time anything like it has been documented in an insect.

Getting there took more than watching bees drink. The team put individual insects in observation tubes and trained each one to seek out and reach a tiny droplet of sugar water positioned just past its antennae. Once that habit was set, the researchers swapped in different liquids, plain water, salt water, bitter quinine, and filmed what happened next in slow motion.

Then came the harder part: ruling out that any of this was just reflex. The team's results point instead toward something closer to preference, a bee not simply reacting to whether a substance is useful or harmful, but registering whether it likes the taste at all. That's the distinction the study is built around, and it's a meaningfully different claim than a knee-jerk response.

Even a brain smaller than a grain of sand may evaluate experiences as pleasant or unpleasant. What that means for insect consciousness, nobody's quite ready to say yet.

The bee made a face. It knew what it liked. The rest is a question science is still figuring out how to ask.

Read the full story at Sci.News, July 13, 2026

Hot Take: Researchers had to design a whole separate experiment just to prove the bees weren't merely reflexing, which says something about how much benefit of the doubt insects don't usually get. The bees licked their lips anyway, and the tidy line between reflex and preference just got a lot blurrier.