Like humans honey bees too avoid making difficult decisions when they don't have enough information to make the right one and the risks of incurring a loss is high.
Decision making has always been a subject many studies have focused upon. After conducting quite a few researches on how humans handle this process, scientists have moved on to see how other species of earth deal with decision making.
In a new study, researchers from Macquarie University found that like humans, honey bees too avoid difficult decisions when they don't have sufficient information to make the right one, thus minimizing their loss. Lead author Dr Andrew Barron conducted a series of tests on honey bees, which involved visual discrimination between targets inside a two-chamber apparatus. The bees had to learn to match a combination of shapes with nectar. If they were able to identify the correct shape, they were rewarded with sweet nectar. The consequences of taking a wrong decision involved a bitter tasting solution. Bees could also choose not to take the test at all and 'opt out'. Barron found that the more difficult the challenge became, the more likely it was that the bees would opt out.
"It's a highly debated topic, whether non-humans have the same abilities to gauge their level of certainty about a choice before taking action," he said. "Similar metacognitive testing has been conducted with dolphins, dogs, and rats. However this study is the first to demonstrate that even insects are capable of making complex and adaptive decisions. The honey bees' assessment of the certainty of a predicted outcome was comparable to that of primates in a similar paradigm."
During the test, the size, shape, color and positions of the targets were constantly changed. Therefore, the bees had to learn a geometric rule to solve the task correctly. The bees demonstrated a high level of learning ability to solve the tasks, but when the discrimination of the targets was made harder, the bees' behavior changed.
"As we made it harder for the bees to assess the correct shape combination, the bees' uncertainty about the correct choice grew, and we observed an increase in the decision to exit the chamber and not take the test to avoid the chance of getting it wrong," said Dr Barron. "This suggests that the bees were only taking the test when they were confident of getting it right."
The study titled "Honey bees selectively avoid difficult choices they lack the information to solve" was published by the National Academy of Sciences.
