Figure 1.
Proportion of visits to cue occupied yellow flowers.
(a) Proportions shown for bees that were allowed to forage with conspecifics prior to experimentation and (b) proportions shown for bees that had never had any social foraging experience. Medians, interquartile range and maximum/minimum values are indicated. The dashed line (0.5) signifies the chance expectation of landing on cue occupied flowers (i.e. no learning has occurred). There was no difference in proportions between the Conspecific and Heterospecific groups, but all Non-social groups performed significantly worse than the Conspecific group.
Figure 2.
Transfer Test: Kaplan-Meier curves of latency times to land on blue flowers.
(a) Curves shown for bees that were allowed to forage with conspecifics prior to experimentation and (b) curves shown for bees that had never had any prior social foraging experience. Each step represents the time at which a bee landed and crosses throughout curves indicate where censoring occurred i.e. where a test subject left the arena without making any landings. For example, graph (a) shows that 80% of subjects within the Heterospecific group (red line) landed on a flower and all bees that did land, landed within 766 seconds. In (a), the Conspecific group had significantly shorter latency times than the Heterospecific group, whereas Conspecific and Heterospecific groups had similar latency times in (b). The Conspecific group had shorter latency times than the Non-social groups.
Figure 3.
A bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) and a honeybee (Apis mellifera) foraging from the same sunflower inflorescence (Helianthus annuus).
Photograph by A. Jaithirtha.