Timing impacts responses to color and odor in a model insect, the bumblebee Bombus impatiens

Bumblebees rely on diverse sensory information to locate flowers while foraging. The majority of research exploring the relationship between visual and olfactory floral cues is performed at local spatial scales and is applicable to understanding floral selection. Floral-cue use during search remains underexplored. This study investigated how the bumblebee Bombus impatiens uses visual versus olfactory information from flowers across behavioral states and spatial scales. At local spatial scales, non-flying animals in an associative learning paradigm will generalize to either unimodal attribute of a learned color+odor cue with equal likelihood. However, bumblebees flying in a wind tunnel shift cue-use strategy depending on the spatiotemporal scale of cue encounter. When both color and odor cues mimic local/within-patch spatial scale, bumblebees weigh color information of a learned floral-cue more heavily. When cues mimic an intermediate/between-patch spatial scale, bumblebees weigh color and odor information equally, and show the highest response to fully intact multimodal cues. Thus the spatiotemporal scale of sensory information influences how bumblebees utilize multimodal floral cues.