I work with mentally sick people and honeybees.

I can usually tell (excluding fakery) if an English speaking person is
mentally ill or not because this is my language.  I cannot tell if someone
who speaks another language is speaking gibberish or not.  Likewise with the
bees, they too are speaking a foreign language.  There is not a reliable way
to interpret there meanings since they are using symbols intended for "like
minded" organisms.

Alan Turning, a computer expert, now dead, pondered whether computers could
become conscious too.  His test was a pragmatic one.  If by typing into a
computer and carrying on a dialogue, if you could not tell whether the
computer was intelligent then you must assume that it was.  Some interesting
computer programs that mimic the psyc-babble are amazingly people-like.

Bridging the species communication gap as being attempted with dolphins,
apes, etc. is frontier research.  Honeybees that talk in angles and distances
may seem to have consciousness because we can overhear their exchanges but
what test can we use to convience ourself that they are consiously aware.
Much of our communication is subconscoius, so perhaps, all of theirs is, and
so conscoiusness may not be a needed assumption.  Remember the Ocam
Razor(sic) principle, don't needless multiply your assumptions.