Bumblebees are capable of both scaffold and social learning, especially when a tasty reward is involved, a new study finds.
In an attempt to better understand the bees' ability to learn by themselves and from each other, University of Guelph researchers conducted two separate studies. They were surprised to find that bumblebees were capable of both scaffold (learning to solve complex problems) and social (learning by communicating with and observing other bees) learning.
For the first study, a set of experienced and inexperienced bees were presented with a series of artificial flowers that required ever-more challenging strategies, such as moving objects aside or upwards to gain a sugar syrup reward. Researchers found that when the inexperienced bees were given complex flowers first, they failed to complete the task and gave up soon. Contrarily, experienced bees were able to solve the problem even when the most complex flower was presented first to them.
"Bees with experience are able to solve new problems that they encounter, while bees with no experience just give up," said Hamida Mirwan, lead author of the study, in a press statement.
This study displayed the bee's capability of scaffold learning, a concept normally restricted to human psychology where learners move through increasingly complex steps to solve a problem.
For the second study, Mirwan created artificial flowers that required the bees to walk on the underside of a disk to get a sugar syrup reward. She found that experienced bees scavenged on the artificial flowers for several days until they became accustomed to feeding on them.
To see whether inexperienced bees could learn from the experienced ones, Mirwan confined inexperienced bees in a mesh container near the artificial flowers where they could observe the experienced bees. When these inexperienced bees were finally allowed to perform the task, they took only 70 seconds to attain the sugar syrup reward. Contrarily, inexperienced bees that were not made to observe the experienced bees before attempting the task were not able to access the syrup.
"Social learning in animals usually involves one individual observing and imitating another, although other kinds of communication can also be involved," said Mirwan. "They could try for up to 30 minutes, but most gave up before then."
"We can't quite explain how bees that had never even seen an artificial flower were able to become adept so quickly at foraging on them, but clearly some in-hive communication took place," Prof. Peter Kevan, co-author of the study added. "It suggests that social learning in bumblebees is even more complex than we first expected."
The first study was published in the journal Animal Cognition and the second study in Psyche. The research was funded by the Ministry of Higher Education, Libya, Canadian Bureau for International Education, Ottawa, Canada, and the Canadian Pollination Initiative.
