The other flowers a bee has visited recently will influence how it judges this one.
Just like people confronted with a sea of options at the grocery store, bees foraging in meadows encounter many different flowers at once. They must decide which ones to visit for food, but it isn’t always a straightforward choice.
My team and I wanted to explore whether floral traits such as scents, colors, and patterns might serve as product labels for bees. In the lab, we trained groups of bees to associate certain artificial flower colors with high-quality “nectar” – actually, a sugar solution we could manipulate. In another recent experiment, we gave bumblebees a choice between two equally attractive flowers – one high in sugar concentration but slower to refill and one quick to refill but containing less sugar. We measured their preference between the two, which was similar.
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