A new study finds that bumblebees pick up new "trends" in their behavior by observing others.
To establish this, variousexperiments. The researchers designed a two-choice puzzle box that could be opened by pressing the red tab clockwise or the blue tab counterclockwise to receive a reward for a 50% sucrose solution.
Demonstrator bees were trained to usered or blue tongues, and watcher bees watched. When it was the observers' turn to solve the puzzle, they overwhelmingly and repeatedly chose to use the same method they had seen, even after discovering an alternative. This preference for the trained variant was maintained by entire bee colonies, with an average of 98.6% of box openings being made using the trained method.
In an additional experiment, the researchersplaced "blue" and "red" demonstrators in the same bee populations. In the first population, 97.3% of the 263 cases of box opening by observers by day 12 used the red method. In the second population, observers preferred the blue method to the red method on all but one day. In both cases, this demonstrated how a behavioral trend can emerge in a population in the first place—largely due to experienced bees moving away from foraging and new learners appearing, rather than due to bees changing their preferred behavior.
Dr Alice Bridges, lead author from LondonQueen Mary University, said: “Bumblebees – and indeed invertebrates in general – are not known to exhibit culture-like phenomena in the wild. However, in our experiments we saw the spread and maintenance of a behavioral «trend» in bumblebee groups, similar to what was observed in primates and birds."
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