Male bumblebees, Bombus terrestris , perform equally well as workers in a serial colour-learning task

Animal Behaviour
Stephan Wolf, Lars Chittka

Abstract

The learning capacities of males and females may differ with sex-specific behavioural requirements. Bumblebees provide a useful model system to explore how different lifestyles are reflected in learning abilities, because their (female but sterile) workers and males engage in fundamentally different behaviour routines. Bumblebee males, like workers, embark on active flower foraging but in contrast to workers they have to trade off their feeding with mate search, potentially affecting their abilities to learn and utilize floral cues efficiently during foraging. We used a serial colour-learning task with freely flying males and workers to compare their ability to flexibly learn visual floral cues with reward in a foraging scenario that changed over time. Male bumblebees did not differ from workers in both their learning speed and their ability to overcome previously acquired associations, when these ceased to predict reward. In all foraging tasks we found a significant improvement in choice accuracy in both sexes over the course of the training. In both sexes, the characteristics of the foraging performance depended largely on the colour difference of the two presented feeder types. Large colour distances entailed fast and reliab...Continue Reading

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Citations

Dec 21, 2016·The Journal of Experimental Biology·Théo RobertNatalie Hempel de Ibarra
May 20, 2018·The Journal of Experimental Biology·Zhiwen GongJames C Nieh
Aug 16, 2019·Current Zoology·Callin M SwitzerRobin Hopkins

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