ArticleScientific reports2017
Fast learning in free-foraging bumble bees is negatively correlated with lifetime resource collection.
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 29 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed.
- Male bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) are more active and behaviourally flexible than workers.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- How does stochasticity in learning impact the accumulation of knowledge and the evolution of learning?Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- What maintains variation in flower accessibility to pollinators in plant communities? A simulation study.BMC ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Pollinator cognition in a plant network.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Data on the diet and nutrition of urban and rural bumblebees.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Wild Foundress Queen Bumble Bees Make Numerous, Short Foraging Trips and Exhibit Frequent Nest Failure: Insights From Trap-Nesting and RFID Tracking.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Article
- Article
- Behavioral and genetic correlates of heterogeneity in learning performance in individual honeybees, Apis mellifera.PloS one · 2024Article
- Cognitive performance is linked to fitness in a wild primate.Science advances · 2023Article
- Individual consistency in the learning abilities of honey bees: cognitive specialization within sensory and reinforcement modalities.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Prior associations affect bumblebees' generalization performance in a tool-selection task.iScience · 2022Article
- Ecology dictates the value of memory for foraging bees.Current biology : CB · 2022Article
- Texas field crickets (Gryllus texensis) use visual cues to place learn but perform poorly when intra- and extra-maze cues conflict.Learning & behavior · 2022Article
- Cognitive flexibility in the wild: Individual differences in reversal learning are explained primarily by proactive interference, not by sampling strategies, in two passerine bird species.Learning & behavior · 2022Article
- Upper-limit agricultural dietary exposure to streptomycin in the laboratory reduces learning and foraging in bumblebees.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Intra-specific differences in cognition: bumblebee queens learn better than workers.Biology letters · 2021Article
- Insulin signaling represents a gating mechanism between different memory phases in Drosophila larvae.PLoS genetics · 2020Article
- Exploring individual variation in associative learning abilities through an operant conditioning task in wild baboons.PloS one · 2020Article
- What are the costs of learning? Modest trade-offs and constitutive costs do not set the price of fast associative learning ability in a parasitoid wasp.Animal cognition · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Despite widespread interest in the potential adaptive value of individual differences in cognition, few studies have attempted to address the question of how variation in learning and memory impacts their performance in natural environments. Using a novel split-colony experimental design we evaluated visual learning performance of foraging naïve bumble bees (Bombus terrestris) in an ecologically relevant associative learning task under controlled laboratory conditions, before monitoring the lifetime foraging performance of the same individual bees in the field. We found appreciable variation among the 85 workers tested in both their learning and foraging performance, which was not predicted by colony membership. However, rather than finding that foragers benefited from enhanced learning performance, we found that fast and slow learners collected food at comparable rates and completed a similar number of foraging bouts per day in the field. Furthermore, bees with better learning abilities foraged for fewer days; suggesting a cost of enhanced learning performance in the wild. As a result, slower learning individuals collected more resources for their colony over the course of their foraging career. These results demonstrate that enhanced cognitive traits are not necessarily beneficial to the foraging performance of individuals or colonies in all environments.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.