Male bumblebees perform learning flights on leaving a flower but not when leaving their nest

Abstract

Female bees and wasps demonstrate, through their performance of elaborate learning flights, when and where they memorise features of a significant site. An important feature of these flights is that the insects look back to fixate the site that they are leaving. Females, which forage for nectar and pollen and return with it to the nest, execute learning flights on their initial departure from both their nest and newly discovered flowers. To our knowledge, these flights have so far only been studied in females. Here, we describe and analyse putative learning flights observed in male bumblebees Bombus terrestris L. Once male bumblebees are mature, they leave their nest for good and fend for themselves. We show that, unlike female foragers, males always fly directly away from their nest, without looking back, in keeping with their indifference to their natal nest. In contrast, after males have drunk from artificial flowers, their flights on first leaving the flowers resemble the learning flights of females, particularly in their fixation of the flowers. These differences in the occurrence of female and male learning flights seem to match the diverse needs of the two sexes to learn about disparate, ecologically relevant places in their surroundings.

Species-specific differences in the fine structure of learning walk elements inCataglyphisants

“…Learning flights of flying hymenoptera include repeated arcs, loops and turn-backs (honeybees : Becker, 1958;Capaldi and Dyer, 1999;Capaldi et al, 2000;Degen et al, 2015Degen et al, , 2016Lehrer, 1991Lehrer, , 1993Opfinger, 1931;Vollbehr, 1975;wasps: Peckham and Peckham, 1898;Stürzl et al, 2016;Tinbergen, 1932;Zeil, 1993a,b;Zeil et al, 1996;bumblebees: Collett et al, 2013;Hempel de Ibarra et al, 2009;Philippides et al, 2013;Riabinina et al, 2014;Robert et al, 2017;Wagner, 1907). Dung beetles perform rotations about their vertical axis before rolling a ball away from the dung pile (Baird et al, 2012), during which they take a snapshot of the celestial scenery (el Jundi et al, 2016).…”

“…the location of their nest. Since the first descriptions over a century ago (Peckham and Peckham, 1898;Wagner, 1907), learning flights have been investigated in great detail in wasps (Tinbergen, 1932;Zeil, 1993a,b;Zeil et al, 1996), honeybees (Becker, 1958;Capaldi and Dyer, 1999;Lehrer, 1991Lehrer, , 1993Opfinger, 1931;Vollbehr, 1975) and bumblebees Hempel de Ibarra et al, 2009;Philippides et al, 2013;Robert et al, 2017) using increasingly sophisticated techniques like harmonic radar (Capaldi et al, 2000;Degen et al, 2015Degen et al, , 2016Osborne et al, 2013) or high-speed cameras (Riabinina et al, 2014;Stürzl et al, 2016). Much less is known about learning walks of ants (Fleischmann et al, 2016;Jayatilaka, 2014;Müller and Wehner, 2010;Muser et al, 2005;Nicholson et al, 1999;Stieb et al, 2012;Wehner et al, 2004).…”

First demonstration of olfactory learning and long term memory in honey bee queens

“…Social insect queens generally share similar sensory learning abilities with workers: for example, Pachycondyla ant odor learning (Dreier et al, 2007), paper wasp visual learning (Michael et al, 2008) and bumble bee color learning (Evans and Raine, 2014). Males and workers likewise possess visual learning in bumble bees (Wolf and Chittka, 2016;Robert et al, 2017;Lichtenstein et al, 2015) and olfactory learning in honey bees (Bhagavan et al, 1994;Menzel and Muller, 1996). Young queens should require excellent spatial learning to successfully return to the nest after their mating flights.…”

The face of animal cognition

“…It has been assumed that they use information about the distance and/or direction of the goal from 1 or more landmarks to compute the location of the goal (Gould et al 2010), but wild foraging hummingbirds, at least, do not seem to do this. Rather, their behavior seems to be more similar to that of the Hymenoptera, using views or panoramas (Pritchard et al 2015;Sturzl et al 2016), although the hummingbirds do not undertake elaborate learning flights or turn back to look at rewarding locations (Robert et al 2017).…”