Bumblebees: their foraging behaviour and cognition

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My research is on learning, cognition and behaviour in bumblebees. The approach is ecological in that the mechanisms of finding and exploiting food sources are investigated. The main long-term objectives of the proposed research are (1) to trace, using methods developed in our lab, the behavioural trajectory from the time that a worker first leaves the colony in search of food through to when she discovers nectar or pollen: (a) what floral characteristics are most important in attracting bumblebees to potential food sources? e.g. does the presence of another bee have any signal value? and (b) what do bees learn from failed attempts to locate food? This work is new in emphasizing the role of non-reward in shaping bee behaviour. (2) to address the fundamental but untested assumption that visual patterns (e.g. drawings, photos) approached by bees are perceived as representations of flowers if not actual flowers. Bees will be tested for picture-object correspondence: following discrimination training on photos, they will be tested for picture-to-object transfer and vice-versa. This is a new area in bumblebee cognition as well as a fertile area of investigation in other-animal cognition where species comparisons have barely begun. (3) to undertake applied research on species distributions and field pollination. Bumblebee behaviour has over the last 10 years become the object of intense investigation in part because of their economic and social value as pollinators and concerns over worldwide declines. We have documented a shift in the distribution of two species in Northern Britain: one common species seems to be replacing the other. We will expand our sampling area and record habitat and forage characteristics. We plan a field study on a suspected pollination deficit for blueberry crops in Georgian Bay: we will measure blueberry production and bee behaviour in response to experimental manipulations of bee densities. This work is directly tied to human concerns over food security and species conservation. This research is inextricably linked to the training of Undergraduate and Graduate students.