Unravelling the mechanisms of trapline foraging in bees

Mathieu Lihoreau (1, 2) , Nigel E. Raine (1, 3) , Andrew M Reynolds (4) , Stelzer Ralph (1) , Lim Ka (4) , Allan Smith (4) , Juliet L. Osborne (4) , Lars Chittka (1)

1 QMUL - Queen Mary University of London
2 The University of Sydney
3 RHUL - Royal Holloway [University of London]
4 Rothamsted Research

Addendum to: Lihoreau M, Raine NE, Reynolds AM, Stelzer RJ, Lim KS, Smith AD, et al.; Addendum to. Radar tracking and motion-sensitive cameras on flowers reveal the development of pollinator multi-destination routes of bumblebees over large spatial scales. PLoS Biol 2012; 10:e1001392; PMID:23049479; http://dx.doi. org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001392. T rapline foraging (repeated sequential visits to a series of feeding locations) is a taxonomically widespread but poorly understood behavior. Investigating these routing strategies in the field is particularly difficult, as it requires extensive tracking of animal movements to retrace their complete foraging history. In a recent study, we used harmonic radar and motion-triggered video cameras to track bumblebees foraging between artificial flowers in a large open field. We describe how all bees gradually developed a near optimal trapline to link all flowers and have identified a simple learning heuristic capable of replicating this optimization behavior. Our results provide new perspectives to clarify the sequence of decisions made by pollinat-ing insects during trapline foraging, and explore how spatial memory is organized in their small brains. " I have always regretted that I did not mark the bees by attaching bits of cotton wool or eiderdown to them with rubber, because this would have made it much easier to follow their paths. " Charles Darwin.

Mots clés: harmonic radar; navigation; spatial cognition; Bombus terrestris; trapline foraging; artificial flowers

Domaines: Biodiversité et Ecologie; Alimentation et Nutrition; Zoologie des invertébrés; Interactions entre organismes; Psychologie et comportements

Mathieu Lihoreau, Nigel E. Raine, Andrew M Reynolds, Stelzer Ralph, Lim Ka, et al.. Unravelling the mechanisms of trapline foraging in bees. Communicative and Integrative Biology, 2013, pp.e22701. ⟨10.4161/cib.22701⟩. ⟨hal-01147256⟩