In some ways, bumblebees are just like us. When they’re tending to their queen’s offspring, they lose significantly more sleep than they do away from the presence of the brood.

In bumblebee colonies, worker bees tend to the queen’s eggs as they move into the larva and then pupa stages before becoming adults. To see if this takes a toll on the amount of sleep the bees get, Guy Bloch at Hebrew University in Israel and his colleagues compared the sleep behaviour of bumblebees during …