Dr Jonathan Birch is leading a project on animal sentience at the London School of Economics: “My own view is it’s more likely than not that bees are sentient.” More evidence is needed, he said, but in the past, academics have not bothered to even ask these questions about insects. “And now they are starting to.”

He thinks the level of sophisticated cognition bees exhibit means it’s unlikely they do not feel any emotions at all. “Sentience is about the capacity to have feelings,” he says. “And what we’re seeing now is some evidence that there are these ... emotion-like states in bees.”