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Study: Honey bees have various "personalities"

A recent study by entomologists at the University of Illinois found that honey bees seem to have distinct "personalities" - some have a stronger desire to seek adventure than others, Wired.com reports.

The finding is also interesting because it points out how thrill seeking is not limited to humans and other vertebrates, the news outlet reports. In fact, the scientists found that the novelty-seeking bees may have genetic similarities to people with the same type of adventurous personality.

"You look at animals and they look really different and they act really different, but when you drill down deeper and look at the genomics, you find these deep commonalities," Gene Robinson, an entomologist, geneticist and neuroscientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told Discovery News. "When you see this kind of result, you can say that personality is not a human invention."

Finding out increasingly fascinating facts about honey bees and other living species on earth  may encourage more people to help animals.

"We like to think we’re different and better than everything else," Hans Hofmann, a behavioral genomicist at the University of Texas at Austin, told the publication. "I think this tells us more about ourselves in terms of where we come from on a more philosophical level."
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