ArticleScientific reports2017
Patterns of pollen and nectar foraging specialization by bumblebees over multiple timescales using RFID.
Article in Scientific reports, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 60 citations in OpenAlex.
- Quantifying wing wear in bumble bees using fractal geometry.PloS one · 2026Article
- Targeted worker removal reveals a lack of flexibility in brood transport specialisation with no compensatory gain in efficiency.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Wearable sensors for monitoring marine environments and their inhabitants.Nature biotechnology · 2023Review
- Larger pollen loads increase risk of heat stress in foraging bumblebees.Biology letters · 2023Article
- Article
- Care-giver identity impacts offspring development and performance in an annually social bumble bee.BMC ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Investigating the Foraging, Guarding and Drifting Behaviors of CommercialJournal of insect behavior · 2021Article
- Bumblebees perceive the spatial layout of their environment in relation to their body size and form to minimize inflight collisions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Automated measurement of long-term bower behaviors in Lake Malawi cichlids using depth sensing and action recognition.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Automatic Classification of Cichlid Behaviors Using 3D Convolutional Residual Networks.iScience · 2020Article
- Honey bees increase their foraging performance and frequency of pollen trips through experience.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Behaviourally specialized foragers are less efficient and live shorter lives than generalists in wasp colonies.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Spatial fidelity of workers predicts collective response to disturbance in a social insect.Nature communications · 2018Article
- Ovary activation does not correlate with pollen and nectar foraging specialization in the bumblebeePeerJ · 2018Article
- Bumblebee flower constancy and pollen diversity over time.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ecological success of social insects is frequently ascribed to improvements in task performance due to division of labour amongst workers. While much research has focused on improvements associated with lifetime task specialization, members of colonies can specialize on a given task over shorter time periods. Eusocial bees in particular must collect pollen and nectar rewards to survive, but most workers appear to mix collection of both rewards over their lifetimes. We asked whether bumblebees specialize over timescales shorter than their lifetime. We also explored factors that govern such patterns, and asked whether reward specialists made more foraging bouts than generalists. In particular, we described antennal morphology and size of all foragers in a single colony and related these factors to each forager's complete foraging history, obtained using radio frequency identification (RFID). Only a small proportion of foragers were lifetime specialists; nevertheless, >50% of foragers specialized daily on a given reward. Contrary to expectations, daily and lifetime reward specialists were not better foragers (being neither larger nor making more bouts); larger bees with more antennal olfactory sensilla made more bouts, but were not more specialized. We discuss causes and functions of short and long-term patterns of specialization for bumblebee colonies.
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