Commentary: Do Bees Play the Producer-Scrounger Game?

Frontiers in Psychology

Mathieu Lihoreau¹ 

关键词: bumblebees;    social learning;    producer-scrounger game;    social foraging;    bumble bees;    social cognition;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01355

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Group-living animals often use social information, in addition to personal sampling, to learn about foraging opportunities. Small-brained insects are no exception (Grüter and Leadbeater, 2014). For instance, inexperienced bumblebees learn to identify profitable flower species by observing conspecifics (Leadbeater and Chittka, 2005). Bumblebees are especially suitable to study insect social learning as they can be easily tested in the lab, allowing for precise control of food resources, individual experience and social cues (Avarguès-Weber et al., 2015). Here we comment on two recent studies showing how bumblebees use personal and social information discriminately to make adaptive foraging decisions, thus setting the scene for complex social foraging dynamics among bees exploiting variable ressources in the field.

【 授权许可】

CC BY