ArticleScientific reports2017
Inter-individual variability in the foraging behaviour of traplining bumblebees.
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 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 64 citations in OpenAlex.
- Demonstrating the reproductive consequences of cognition: learning from experience.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Ant foraging: optimizing self-organization as a solution to a traveling salesman problem.Oecologia · 2025Article
- Trapline foraging by nectar-collecting hornets.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- Article
- Age dominates flight distance and duration, while body size shapes flight speed inProceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Using motion-detection cameras to monitor foraging behaviour of individual butterflies.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Modeling bee movement shows how a perceptual masking effect can influence flower discovery.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Prior associations affect bumblebees' generalization performance in a tool-selection task.iScience · 2022Article
- Substantial variability in morphological scaling among bumblebee colonies.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- A model of resource partitioning between foraging bees based on learning.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Body Size and Behavioural Plasticity Interact to Influence the Performance of Free-Foraging Bumble Bee Colonies.Insects · 2021Article
- Investigating the Foraging, Guarding and Drifting Behaviors of CommercialJournal of insect behavior · 2021Article
- Environmental and Molecular Modulation of Motor Individuality in Larval Zebrafish.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- Variation and Variability inFrontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- Honey bees increase their foraging performance and frequency of pollen trips through experience.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- The Landscape Genetic Signature of Pollination by Trapliners: Evidence From the Tropical Herb,Frontiers in genetics · 2019Article
- Disease outbreak thresholds emerge from interactions between movement behavior, landscape structure, and epidemiology.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Spatial fidelity of workers predicts collective response to disturbance in a social insect.Nature communications · 2018Article
- Continuous Radar Tracking Illustrates the Development of Multi-destination Routes of Bumblebees.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Bumblebee flower constancy and pollen diversity over time.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Workers of social insects, such as bees, ants and wasps, show some degree of inter-individual variability in decision-making, learning and memory. Whether these natural cognitive differences translate into distinct adaptive behavioural strategies is virtually unknown. Here we examined variability in the movement patterns of bumblebee foragers establishing routes between artificial flowers. We recorded all flower visitation sequences performed by 29 bees tested for 20 consecutive foraging bouts in three experimental arrays, each characterised by a unique spatial configuration of artificial flowers and three-dimensional landmarks. All bees started to develop efficient routes as they accumulated foraging experience in each array, and showed consistent inter-individual differences in their levels of route fidelity and foraging performance, as measured by travel speed and the frequency of revisits to flowers. While the tendency of bees to repeat the same route was influenced by their colony origin, foraging performance was correlated to body size. The largest foragers travelled faster and made less revisits to empty flowers. We discuss the possible adaptive value of such inter-individual variability within the forager caste for optimisation of colony-level foraging performances in social pollinators.
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