Meeting Abstract
Apis mellifera, also known as the European honey bee, sometimes shows a bias toward specific colors of flowers. They can also show preferences for foraging at specific times of the day, i.e. morning or afternoon shifts. The question this research aims to explore is whether or not a bee who was particular in choosing a shift was also particular regarding decision making while foraging. Our hypotheses were that shift work would correlate with foraging behavioral patterns, and that bees would react to a decrease in flower reward by choosing the more reliable color of flower. Moreover, foragers may respond to variability and change flower preference or they may be constant to one type of flower. Bees that forage only at one time may also forage only on one type of flower. We set up two bee hives and taught them to visit feeders of sucrose water. The bees were then marked with different colors specific to hive and time of day to observe the shift work behavior. Then, the marked bees were followed in order to observe their decision making process when the reward of a particular color of flower, that had previously been experienced as consistent, was reduced while the other remained higher. We found that the bees fit in to one of four categories of foraging behavior, which did not correlate with their shift work preference. We also noticed that the number of morning bees and afternoon bees were not evenly distributed.
