Survival study asks value of a clever bee
When it comes to factors that can hinder your survival, you’d expect being a quick study wouldn’t be on the list.
Yet that’s the conundrum facing our bumblebees — and which Kiwi scientists are starting to grapple with.
In a study published last year, Plant and Food Research scientist Dr Lisa Evans and colleagues surprisingly demonstrated how bumblebees that learn faster had a much shorter foraging lifespan than their slowlearning co-workers.
They also found fast-learning bumblebees collected food at rates comparable to colony mates that were less smart, and made a similar number of foraging bouts per day.
In a new project that just received a $300,000 Marsden Fund grant, Evans and her team will compare how wild bumblebees learn differently in certain kinds of floral environments.
They will test the advantage of being a good learner by transplanting colonies of bees from each of the two environments into the other — then measuring any changes in their reproductive success.
This could reveal whether learning potential provides a special advantage to bumblebee colonies in some environments, but not others.
“The over-arching question I am addressing is: when is it beneficial for individuals and populations to be good learners, or more specifically learn quickly?” Evans explained.
Bumblebees were ideal candidates for investigating links between environment, learning capacity and reproductive success because they could solve a wide variety of problems, and seemed to have many cognitive abilities akin to mammals.
They were “generalist foragers” and had to learn the certain traits of flowers that told them the quality and quantity of reward they’d receive in return for their hard work.
These reward cues, based on the scent and colour of flowers,will be assessed by Evans and her team at a mix of sites around the country.
Evans said the study stood to yield important new insights which could indicate how different environments could affect whether a colony would be successful.