A team of researchers from the Queen Mary University of London, UK, has discovered that bumblebees can use cues from their rivals the honeybees to learn where the best food resources are.
A bumblebee and a honeybee foraging from the same sunflower inflorescence (A. Jaithirtha / E. Dawson / L. Chittka)
The researchers trained a colony of bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) to use cues provided by a different species, the honeybee (Apis mellifera), as well as cues provided by fellow bumblebees to locate food resources on artificial flowers.
The results, published online in the journal PLoS-ONE, show that the bumblebees are able to learn the information from the honeybees just as efficiently as when the information came from their own species.
“Most social learning research has focused on learning between members of the same species,” said Erika Dawson, a co-author on the study and a PhD student at the Queen Mary University of London. “But in the same way that human engineers can pick up useful tricks from animals (such as using bird aerodynamics to design planes), animals might of course learn from different species where the best food is, where predation looms or where the best place to nest can be found.”
“We wanted to determine whether animals can use any social cue to enhance their environment, even if they come from another species that share their habitat, resources or predators.”
The researchers suggest that bees would have opportunities to learn cues from their own species and other species to an equal degree in the wild, as they often share the same flower species as a source of food. This is particularly true for large flowers such as sunflowers, which are often fed from by multiple pollinators simultaneously.
The findings show that cues from honeybees, once they have been learnt as predictors of reward on one flower species, can facilitate the sampling of new flower species.
The findings also show that competition between the two species may be much more severe than previously assumed if individuals not only use individual exploration and copying of their own species to identify rewarding plants, but also use the information provided by a competing species.
“If bumblebees use individual exploration and copying of their fellow bumblebees to identify rewarding plants, but also use the information provided by a rival species, this could have important ecological implications for community structure and formation, and may help us better understand the impact of competition within natural pollinator communities,” Erika Dawson concluded.
