Even bees are tightlipped about their trade secrets, according to a new study.
In the world of bumblebees, experienced pollinators are fiercely protective when copycats try to poach their hard-earned knowledge.
"Like other pollinators, bees face complex routing challenges when collecting nectar and pollen - they have to learn how to link patches of flowers together in the most efficient way, to minimize their travel distance and flight costs, just like in a traveling salesman problem," said lead researcher Dr. Mathieu Lihoreau of the Queen Mary University of London, according to a university release.
It takes time for bees to figure out the best way to collect pollen, so Lihoreau and his team wanted to see if bees worked together to improve foraging performance.
"We wanted to monitor the way bumblebees behave when they bump into each other at flowers - would they compete, attack each other, or tolerate each other?" Lihoreau said.
To see if bees copied or let others copy their flower visitation sequences, Lihoreau and his team built a large outdoor flight cage where they planted a variety of artificial flowers they used to control nectar flow rates. The artificial flowers were also equipped with motion-sensitive video cameras.
In the experiment, researchers let in two bees at a time. One bee was always more experienced and the other was always a newcomer. Lihoreau and his team predicted that the newcomers would save time by copying the foraging route of their more experienced peers.
Study results revealed that newcomer bees did try to copy the choices of more experienced bees. However, experienced bees didn't make it easy for newcomer bees to learn. Footage from the tiny video cameras hidden in the artificial flowers revealed that experienced bees often attacked and evicted newcomers from flowers.
"Bumble bees foraging simultaneously in a common environment adopted different strategies depending on their experience of the flower array. Residents, that had started to establish a foraging area several hours before the arrival of newcomers, continued to exploit familiar feeding sites by increasing their frequency of floral visits and evicting newcomers when they encountered them on flowers," researchers wrote in the study.
"This work helps us understand how animals with relatively simple brains find workable solutions to complex route-finding problems. Understanding how bees find and compete for flowers in the landscape is a critical first step to conserving these animals, and the essential pollination services they provide to crops and wild plants," said co-author Nigel Raine.
The latest findings are published in the journal PLOS ONE.
