Adaptive Strategies for Foraging and Their Implications for Flower Constancy, or: Do Honey Bees Multitask?.

摘要

Classical experiments on honey bee time-memory showed that foragers trained to collect food at a fixed time of day return the following day with remarkable time-accuracy. Previous field experiments revealed that not all foragers return to a food source on unrewarded test days. Rather, there exist 2 subgroups: "persistent" foragers reconnoiter the source; "reticent" foragers wait in the hive for confirmation of source availability. To examine how these foragers contribute to a colony's ability to reallocate foragers across sources with rapidly changing availabilities, foragers were trained to collect sucrose during a restricted window for several days and observed over 3 days throughout which the feeder was empty. In 2 separate trials, activity monitoring revealed a high level of activity apparently directed at other food sources. This "extracurricular" activity showed extensive temporal overlap with visits to the feeder, indicating that honey bees can manage at least 2 different overlapping time memories.