Just as people are faced with an ocean of choices at the grocery store, bees foraging in meadows encounter many different flowers at once. You need to decide where to go for a meal, and it’s not always an easy choice.
Flowers provide two types of food, nectar and pollen, which differ in important ways. For example, nectar can vary. Concentration, volume, replenishment rateand accessibility. It also contains secondary metabolites such as caffeine and nicotine. unpleasant or attractive depending on About how much there is. Similarly, pollen contains proteins and lipids, which affect nutritional quality.
When faced with these choices, you would think that bees would always choose the flowers that are most available and have the highest quality nectar and pollen. But that’s not the case. Instead, just like a human grocery shopper, Decisions about which flowers to visit depend on Talk about recent experiences with similar flowers and what other flowers are available.
I find this behavior fascinating. my the study Observe how animals behave in their daily choices, especially when searching for food. It turns out that bees and other pollinators make the same irrational shopping decisions as humans.
Predictably irrational
Humans can be illogical sometimes. For example, someone who wins $5 on a scratch-off ticket immediately after winning $1 on a scratch-off ticket will be excited. On the other hand, if that same person wins $5 on a ticket; I’d be disappointed if I won $10.. Even if the outcome is the same, the perception changes depending on what happened up until then.
Perceptions also influence how people evaluate product labels. For example, one might expect an expensive wine with a fancy French label to be better than a cheap, run-of-the-mill wine. But when there is a discrepancy between how good something is and how good someone expects it to be, one may feel: Disproportionally disappointed or pleased.
Humans are also very sensitive to the context they choose. For example, people are more likely to pay higher prices for televisions. When small and expensive items become available.
This irrational behavior is so predictable that Companies have devised clever ways to exploit These trends apply to product pricing and packaging, commercial creation, shelf inventory management, website and app design, and more. This behavior is so common in non-consumer settings that it influences the attitudes of politicians. Design public policy and try to influence voting behavior.
Like Mind
Research shows that bumblebees and humans share many of these behaviors. A 2005 study found that bees evaluate the quality of nectar. compared to recent feeding experience: Bees trained to visit feeders with medium-quality nectar readily accepted it, whereas bees trained to visit feeders with high-quality nectar accepted medium-quality nectar. often refused nectar.
My team and I wanted to investigate whether floral characteristics such as scent, color, and pattern could serve as product labels for bees. In the lab, we trained a group of bees to associate the color of a particular artificial flower with high-quality “nectar,” which is actually a sugar solution that we can manipulate.
A bumblebee colony (right) is connected by a tunnel to a foraging ground (left), where colored discs act as artificial flowers. Claire Hemingway, CC BY-SA
For example, one group was trained to associate blue flowers with high-quality nectar. The group was then provided with medium-quality nectar from blue or yellow flowers.
It turns out that bees are more willing to accept medium-quality nectar from yellow flowers. than they came from the blue. Their expectations mattered.
In another recent experiment, bumblebees were given a choice between two equally attractive flowers. One is a flower that has a high sugar concentration but refills slowly, and the other is a flower that refills quickly but has a low sugar content. When we measured their preferences, they were similar.
We then expanded our options by including a third flower with even lower sugar concentrations or even slower replenishment. The existence of a new low-reward flower has been revealed. I made the middle ones look relatively better.
These results are interesting and suggest that for both bees and other animals, available options can guide foraging decisions.
In the center of each artificial flower is a tube that the bees enter to access the sugar solution. Claire Hemingway, CC BY-SA
Potential uses
Understanding these behaviors of bumblebees and other pollinators can have important consequences for people. Bees and bumblebees are used commercially to support livelihoods Billions of dollars in annual crop production.
Farmers could strategically exploit this tendency if bees began to visit certain flowers more often when others were available. Just like a store presents stock shelves Unattractive and attractive optionsfarmers can plant specific flower species in or near crops to increase visitation to targeted crops.
Claire Therese Hemingway is an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee. This article is republished from conversation under Creative Commons License. please read original article.
