ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
Feeding specialization and longer generation time are associated with relatively larger brains in bees.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 16 citations in OpenAlex.
- Evolution of neurometabolic frugality in harvester ants.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2026Article
- Pollinator cognition in a plant network.Biology letters · 2025Article
- The brain atlas of a subsocial bee reflects that of eusocial Hymenoptera.Genes, brain, and behavior · 2024Article
- Brain size predicts bees' tolerance to urban environments.Biology letters · 2023Article
- Social Brain Energetics: Ergonomic Efficiency, Neurometabolic Scaling, and Metabolic Polyphenism in Ants.Integrative and comparative biology · 2022Article
- Behavioral performance and division of labor influence brain mosaicism in the leafcutter ant Atta cephalotes.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2022Article
- Brain size predicts learning abilities in bees.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Feeding specialization and longer generation time are associated with relatively larger brains in bees.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Cognitive tasks could be biased towards generalists: a lesson from wild non-eusocial bees.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
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Authors and funding
10 authors at 7 institutions in 5 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Despite their miniature brains, insects exhibit substantial variation in brain size. Although the functional significance of this variation is increasingly recognized, research on whether differences in insect brain sizes are mainly the result of constraints or selective pressures has hardly been performed. Here, we address this gap by combining prospective and retrospective phylogenetic-based analyses of brain size for a major insect group, bees (superfamily Apoidea). Using a brain dataset of 93 species from North America and Europe, we found that body size was the single best predictor of brain size in bees. However, the analyses also revealed that substantial variation in brain size remained even when adjusting for body size. We consequently asked whether such variation in relative brain size might be explained by adaptive hypotheses. We found that ecologically specialized species with single generations have larger brains-relative to their body size-than generalist or multi-generation species, but we did not find an effect of sociality on relative brain size. Phylogenetic reconstruction further supported the existence of different adaptive optima for relative brain size in lineages differing in feeding specialization and reproductive strategy. Our findings shed new light on the evolution of the insect brain, highlighting the importance of ecological pressures over social factors and suggesting that these pressures are different from those previously found to influence brain evolution in other taxa.
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