Meeting Abstract
Bumblebees, like honeybees, learn from past floral encounters to make future foraging decisions (ex: using spatial memory to return to learned floral patches). Likewise, bumblebees utilize social information while foraging: changing their behavior based upon conspecific scent marks left on inflorescences; and initiating foraging upon receipt of recruitment pheromones released in the nest by returning foragers. However, unlike honeybees, bumblebees have no direct analogue for the waggle dance – i.e. a way for returning workers to provide reliable directions to navigate to a novel resource. While evidence suggests that returning workers may recruit new foragers to the novel floral scent, there is no obvious directional information provided. This means that foragers moving on from a senesced resource or leaving the nest for the first time are, so to speak, flying blind. Presumably the rich array of sensory signals provided by flowers serve as billboards for searching bumblebees. Although recent work is beginning to elucidate how bumblebees integrate visual and olfactory signals in the context of learning, as yet we know very little about how these differing modalities contribute to resource localization. Minimal field evidence bolstered by lab evidence supports the idea that floral scents are attractive to bees. Many studies indicate that visual signals from flowers play a role in foraging behavior. However, these different sensory modalities potentially operate at vastly different scales in the field, which could in turn affect which sensory signals are most relevant during search behavior. This study models the likelihood of encountering an olfactory versus a visual signal in a field environment to shed light on the sensory information available to searching bumblebees.
