Meeting Abstract
Bees foraging for floral rewards are one of our most thoroughly studied examples of generalist foraging ecology. Nectar-foraging generalist bees forage effectively from diverse plant species by modifying their collection behavior via learning. While generalist bees must also collect pollen from diverse plant species, surprisingly no literature has examined whether and how generalists are able to adjust their behavior to collect pollen effectively. Most generalist bees, such as bumblebees, use two routines to collect pollen from diverse floral morphologies. Bees scrabble for pollen when pollen is presented openly on the anthers; to collect pollen from flowers that conceal it within tubal floral morphology (poricidal floral morphology), bees sonicate. We demonstrate that bumblebees exhibit flexible and effective pollen collection by switching between their two pollen collection routines, floral sonication and scrabbling. Flexibility is regulated by the interplay between two floral cues: chemical anther cues stimulating sonication and mechanical pollen cues suppressing it. We discuss how this flexibility differs in key respects from that of nectar foraging and how it could have facilitated the repeated evolution of poricidal floral morphology.
