Our research suggests that social learning may have had a greater influence on the evolution of this behavior than previously imagined.” The behavioral repertoires of social insects like these bumblebees are some of the most intricate on the planet, yet most of this is still thought to be instinctive. However, in our experiments, we saw the spread and maintenance of a behavioral “trend” in groups of bumblebees – similar to what has been seen in primates and birds. Alice Bridges, the lead author from Queen Mary University of London, said: “Bumblebees – and, indeed, invertebrates in general – aren’t known to show culture-like phenomena in the wild. It might be possible that what now appears instinctive could have been socially learned, at least originally.ĭr. If bumblebees are capable of this, too, this could potentially explain the evolutionary origin of many of the complex behaviors seen among social insects.
Similar results from similar experiments have been used in species such as primates and birds to suggest that they, like humans, are capable of culture. Credit: Bridges AD et al., 2023, PLOS Biology In both cases, this demonstrated how a behavioral trend might emerge in a population in the first place – for the most part, due to experienced bees retiring from foraging and new learners arising, rather than any bees changing their preferred behavior.Ī bee opens a puzzle box by pushing against the red tab to rotate the lid of the box clockwise. In the second population, observers preferred the blue method over the red on all days except one. In the first population, 97.3% of the 263 incidences of box-opening by observers by day 12 used the red method. In an additional experiment, the researchers put both ‘blue’ and ‘red’ demonstrators into the same populations of bees. The median number of boxes opened in a day by the observer bees with a demonstrator was 28 boxes a day, whereas it was only 1 for the control colony. In this group, some bees managed to open the puzzle boxes, but did so far fewer times than those who benefitted from seeing another bee do it first.
The importance of social learning to the acquisition of puzzle box solutions was also illustrated through the control group, which lacked a demonstrator.
This preference for the taught option was maintained by whole colonies of bees, with a mean of 98.6% of box openings made using the taught method. When it was the observers’ turn to tackle the puzzle, they overwhelmingly and repeatedly chose to use the same method that they had seen, even after discovering the alternative option. ‘Demonstrator’ bees were trained to use either the red or blue tabs, with ‘observer’ bees watching. Bees feeding from a puzzle box opened by pushing the blue tab.
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