10.5061/DRYAD.0C96P
Muth, Felicity
University of Nevada Reno
Papaj, Daniel R.
University of Arizona
Leonard, Anne S.
University of Nevada Reno
Data from: Colour learning when foraging for nectar and pollen: bees learn
two colours at once
Dryad
dataset
2015
Foraging
associative
bumblebee
Bombus
2015-09-04T14:19:20Z
2015-09-04T14:19:20Z
en
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2015.0628
515566 bytes
1
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
Bees are model organisms for the study of learning and memory, yet nearly
all such research to date has used a single reward, nectar. Many bees
collect both nectar (carbohydrates) and pollen (protein) on a single
foraging bout, sometimes from different plant species. We tested whether
individual bumblebees could learn colour associations with nectar and
pollen rewards simultaneously in a foraging scenario where one floral type
offered only nectar and the other only pollen. We found that bees readily
learned multiple reward–colour associations, and when presented with novel
floral targets generalized to colours similar to those trained for each
reward type. These results expand the ecological significance of work on
bee learning and raise new questions regarding the cognitive ecology of
pollination.
All learning data for experiment and summaryThe first tab is a summary of
all bees used and what they did (bees that did not collect nectar or
pollen or only collected small amounts of one were not included in main
learning analysis). The second tab is all behavioural data with key in
text box.all data_Dryad.xlsx