Can sociality facilitate learning of complex tasks? Lessons from bees and flowers

Area of Science:

• Evolutionary biology
• Animal behavior
• Ecology

Background:

• Animal societies represent a major evolutionary transition with poorly understood impacts on learning.
• Bees, exhibiting a spectrum from solitary to eusocial lifestyles, serve as excellent models for studying social evolution.
• The acquisition of new foraging technologies, like exploiting complex flowers, is crucial for understanding adaptive innovation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how bees acquire the 'technology' of foraging on morphologically complex flowers.
• To determine if eusociality facilitates this technological shift in foraging behavior.
• To model the optimal foraging choices of social bees between simple and complex flowers.

Main Methods:

• Development of a mathematical model simulating social bee foraging decisions.
• Analysis of factors influencing the choice between simple (easy access, low reward) and complex (difficult access, high reward) flowers.
• Re-analysis of a large dataset on bee-flower interactions to validate model predictions.

Main Results:

• The model predicts that colony size does not influence flower choice.
• Increased foraging on complex flowers is associated with longer colony and individual longevity, a higher proportion of foragers, and enhanced learning ability.
• Eusocial bee characteristics, such as long-lived colonies and numerous foragers, correlate with greater exploitation of complex flowers.

Conclusions:

• Eusociality supports, but is not essential for, the development of learning to exploit complex floral resources.
• The findings suggest that social structures can facilitate learning-dependent innovations in animal behavior.
• Parallels exist between the evolution of insect sociality and other major evolutionary transitions that enable learning innovations.