Bumblebees can learn by watching a trained bee demonstrating one of two ways to solve puzzle for a sugary reward, then copy the bee to solve the puzzle in the same way. Credit: Diego Perez-Lopez, PLOS (CC-BY 4.0)
Bees that learned from others were more adept and preferred the learned solution over alternatives.
Bumblebees learn to solve a puzzle by watching more experienced bees, and this behavioral preference then spreads through the colony, according to a study published on March 7th in the open access journal PLOS Biology by Alice Dorothy Bridges and colleagues at Queen Mary University of London, UK.
Social animals like primates are skilled at learning by watching others, and previous work has shown that individual bees can learn tasks in this way, but it remained unclear whether these new behaviors would then spread through the colony. To investigate, researchers tested six colonies of bumblebees (