Oh, you quote shakespeare every day!
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Weāve known for a while that bee brains respond to cocaine, so we shouldnāt be too surprised that their brains have some level of consciousness. How can you trip the light fantastic without a spirit to go tripping?
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When insects prove people are conscious?
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Then again, men have been trying to do this for years (or so Iāve heard 
)
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Hereās a page of dragonfly haikus which mentions dragonflies eating themselves as a possible urban myth:
When I was a child, living on an Air Force base in Okinawa, it was a common belief, among the elementary school set, a dragonfly would eat itself if you caught it and fed it its own tail. I looked online and didnāt find any references to this notion so maybe we were all sniffing the good Japanese glue.
What do you expect, given their ancestors?
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Took that last kid long enough to drop the sack! Reminds me of someone unable to get their hand out of a jar because they didnāt think to let go of the cookies.
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Thereās never a hydraulic press around when you want one.
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The blood is the life! The blood is the life!
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This is either so meta I donāt understand it, or itās a flawed analogy.
An alternative analogy; you can build a computer with a few thousand gates or a trillion gates, but they are both still Turing-complete.
What interests me about this is what we mean by consciousness. My own (inadequate, tentative and derived from my own work in control systems and control theory) definition is āhaving a model of the world, and also having the ability to draw external conclusions about the modelā. At one level this might be the model including water falling out of the sky, and the external conclusions ranging from the generalisation ārainā through to meteorology, and working out āthis isnāt rain, itās someone with a hoseā. At the bee level this might be identifying that a stimulus doesnāt fit the model.
Without a way of identifying that the stimulus doesnāt fit the model, how does a self-operating control system develop new responses to new stimuli?
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Well, if your few-thousand-gate Turing-complete computer needs fifteen billion times the life of the universe before heat death, to be able to, say, tell you how itās feeling, then it doesnāt really matter, does it?
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āConsciousnessā strikes me as one of those weak-assed delineators we prop up between ourselves and the rest of the animals. Like tool use, like language, like emotions, like all the conceptual barricades between Us and Them that keep getting knocked down with the regularity of bowling pins.
Itās the height of presumptuousness to say that recognizing an elephant or an orangutan or a whale grieving for a deceased friend or family member is āanthropomorphism.ā It presumes that empathy is the exclusive domain of humans (as if!) and any effort to extend it to ālesser creaturesā is folly. Nobody thinks that being hungry or horny is exclusive to our rarefied domain; why would it be any different for love or grief or jealousy or anything else? If anything, the category error is in hubristically regarding ourselves as somehow special and distinguished from the beasts. āWeāre gonna need a bigger book.ā
Okay, maybe we got an exclusive on existential ennui, but thatās nothing to write home about, even if we could somehow dredge up the energy to do so.
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Thereās almost certainly something it is like to be a bat, and probably a bee as well, but thereās no way to know what itās like.
Part of the problem is that when we use the term āconsciousnessā, we donāt really have a way to compare what exactly we are talking about. If some subset of people using the term āconsciousnessā are using it to refer to a process that involves complex grammatical use of language* (I find this to be a very plausible conjecture), then bees and bats are probably not conscious in the way they are using the term.
The whole concept of āconsciousnessā is so nebulous and poorly defined that itās almost pointless to ask these questions, and we can never really answer them anyway. Like @boundegar points out, we canāt even prove or know for sure that other humans are conscious.
*Yes, bees have a ālanguageā with some syntax etc., and yes bats make really complex noises that could hypothetically be used to communicate as well as be used for sonar, but I think itās safe to say that neither spends very much time talking about ājusticeā or āromanceā or even ābeautiful sunsetsā. Bees donāt seem to talk about anything besides where to find flowers of a particular color.
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Sure, but Iām sure there is some kind of stimulant we could give a roundworm to make it more aggressive, more hyper or whatever. And we could measure that effect in itās neurons, but if someone told me that a worm with 300 neurons that donāt even form a proper brain was conscious Iād have to scoff at that a little (or really clarify what we mean by āconsciousā).
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As more of this science gets developed, I begin to suspect that itās not so much that we underestimate animal sentience, so much as we overestimate human sentience. When weāre good, weāre pretty awesome. But itās that pesky hump in the bell curve we need to be paying attention to, not so much the skinny bit at the end.
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It is a very elaborate ruse we set up for ourselves, isnāt it?
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Yellow jackets, too! Little arseholes watch you when you get too close to one of their nests.
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Looks like Clark Kentās costume change went horribly wrong. Never trust a strange phone booth.
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A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what youāll know tomorrow.
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