Let’s discuss. We’re going to head back to see if this bee behavior meets those five rules of play we talked about in the introduction. So the first is that the rolling of these balls is not functional. The bees didn’t seem to have a destination in mind. They didn’t try and eat them or mate with them. So there’s not actually a functional role of the behavior of playing with the balls. Second, they chose to roll the wooden balls. They had options and weren’t forced into anything. The third rule of play, the rotation of the ball as it rolls is different than other movements that a bee would normally do. For example, a bee going to pollinate a flower is a very different movement than the rotation of rolling the ball. And they didn’t roll any faster as the experiment went on, which a lot of animals do with functional tasks like eating and trying to find things. The animals get better at them as time goes on. And that’s not the case with play. On to the fourth rule of play. The duration, the distance, and the route that the bees took with the balls were varied. There was clearly not a plan. So they have what could be called creativity with rolling the balls. The researchers also did not find any stress indicators from the bees. So, looking at the evidence for these five rules of play, the researchers decided that it was enough evidence to suggest that bees in fact do play.