The Influence of Prior Learning Experience on Pollinator Choice: An Experiment Using Bumblebees on Two Wild Floral Types of Antirrhinum majus

Abstract

Understanding how pollinator behavior may influence pollen transmission across floral types is a major challenge, as pollinator decision depends on a complex range of environmental cues and prior experience. Here we report an experiment using the plant Antirrhinum majus and the bumblebee Bombus terrestris to investigate how prior learning experience may affect pollinator preferences between floral types when these are presented together. We trained naive bumblebees to forage freely on flowering individuals of either A. majus pseudomajus (magenta flowers) or A. majus striatum (yellow flowers) in a flight cage. We then used a Y-maze device to expose trained bumblebees to a dual choice between the floral types. We tested the influence of training on their choice, depending on the type of plant signals available (visual signals, olfactory signals, or both). Bumblebees had no innate preference for either subspecies. Bumblebees trained on the yellow-flowered subspecies later preferred the yellow type, even when only visual or only olfactory signals were available, and their preference was not reinforced when both signal types were available. In contrast, bumblebees trained on the magenta-flowered subspecies showed no further preference between floral types and took slightly more time to make their choice. Since pollinator constancy has been observed in wild populations of A. majus with mixed floral types, we suggest that such constancy likely relies on short-term memory rather than acquired preference through long-term memory induced by prior learning.

Humans Share More Preferences for Floral Phenotypes With Pollinators Than With Pests

“…Whilst bumblebees are well known for pollinating Antirrhinum plants ( Jaworski et al, 2015 ) and humans have used this genus long as ornamental ( Kowarik, 2005 ), the antagonistic effect of thrips on these plants may be either caused by a strong pollen reduction or by the transmission of pathogens ( Ullman et al, 2002 ).…”

“…Tower-feeding foraging worker bumblebees were marked on the thorax with water-soluble paints and used for further experiments. Some bumblebees were used more than once and, in those cases, at least 7days were left between assays to allow short term learning-associations to disappear from their memories ( Jaworski et al, 2015 ). Consequently, we consider our results in the context of flower naive responses of bumblebees, here testing their innate preferences to the different floral traits.…”

Long‐term experimental drought alters floral scent and pollinator visits in a Mediterranean plant community despite overall limited impacts on plant phenotype and reproduction

“…vulgaris, was too rare in our system to quantify pollinator visits and therefore to assess the impact of reduced nectar production under drought on pollinator communities. If a similar impact of drought on of such VOCs singly or in mixtures, as well as preferences of naïve and experimented in a controlled environment between plants under control and drought conditions, would help make this connection (Burkle & Runyon, 2017;Jaworski et al, 2015;Proffit et al, 2020).…”

“…Pollinators may adapt to altered floral olfactory and visual signals (Jaworski et al, 2015) but qualitative and quantitative changes in floral resources and therefore potentially in pollinator diet breadth (Schweiger et al, 2010) 4.…”

Individual‐ and population‐level personalities in a floriphilic katydid

“…Nonetheless, the study of florivores and florivory is still generally neglected and has received less attention compared to leaf herbivory and pollination (McCall & Irwin, ). For example, although learning has been observed in some pollinators (e.g., Juillet, Salzmann, & Scopece, ; Jaworki et al, ; de Jager, Willis‐Jones, Critchley, & Glover, ), there has still been no concerted effort to investigate whether florivores can also learn and how this might be crucial to better understand florivory.…”