Social learning strategies in honeybee foragers: do the costs of using private information affect the use of social information?

Individual honeybee foragers often need to decide between using private versus social information when choosing where to forage. Social information is provided by the waggle dances made by successful foragers. Experienced foragers also have private information about the feeding sites they have previ...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Animal behaviour 2013-06, Vol.85 (6), p.1443-1449
Main Authors: Grüter, Christoph, Segers, Francisca H.I. D., Ratnieks, Francis L.W.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal behavior
Animal cognition
Animal communication
Apis mellifera
Apoidea
bee dances
communication
Foraging behavior
honey bees
honeybee
learning
prediction
social learning
sucrose
waggle dance
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Summary:Individual honeybee foragers often need to decide between using private versus social information when choosing where to forage. Social information is provided by the waggle dances made by successful foragers. Experienced foragers also have private information about the feeding sites they have previously visited. Previous work has shown that honeybees are flexible in their information use strategy. However, the conditions that favour the use of one information source over the other remain poorly understood. It has been suggested that foragers rely more on social information when use of private information becomes more costly. We tested this by training two groups of foragers to two feeding sites, 120 or 600m from the hive, both providing a sucrose solution identical in concentration. We then made these two locations unrewarding and observed whether foragers trained to the further, and therefore more costly to check, site paid more attention to dances for a third, closer site (120m in a different direction) than foragers trained to the 120m site. Contrary to prediction, foragers trained to the 600m feeder followed dances for the novel feeder less (25% fewer waggle runs) than foragers trained to 120m feeder. Foragers from the distant feeding site were also not more likely to arrive at the food source advertised by dances. Our results suggest that higher costs of private information do not increase the use of social information as long as bees are satisfied with their original food source (i.e. they use a ‘copy-if-dissatisfied’ strategy). Additionally, we show that switching from private to social information is preceded by a rapid motivational change. Minutes before switching to the advertised resource, the foragers increased their dance-following time by 65% compared with earlier dances. •We investigated social-learning strategies in honeybee foragers.•We tested whether costs of private information affect the use of social information.•Higher costs of private information did not increase use of social information.•Honeybee foragers appear to use a ‘copy-if-dissatisfied’ social-learning strategy.•Switching from private to social information follows a rapid motivational change.
ISSN:0003-3472
1095-8282
DOI:10.1016/j.anbehav.2013.03.041