ArticleeLife2023
How honey bees make fast and accurate decisions.
Article in eLife, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
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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.
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
11 citing papers in PubMed, 21 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Never underestimate honeybees: Their exceptionally diverse adaptive strategies.Journal of advanced research · 2026Review
- From chemistry to cognition: the adaptive origins of consciousness under constraint.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Article
- Testing Bottom-up Cuing Effects on Target Detection and Discrimination in Bumblebees.Journal of insect behavior · 2026Article
- Microbial metabolites as engines of behavioral variation across animals.Gut microbes · 2025Review
- Article
- Article
- How bumblebees manage conflicting information seen on arrival and departure from flowers.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- The limits of metacognitive control during perceptual decision-making: opting out without improving accuracy.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Through an animal's eye: the implications of diverse sensory systems in scientific experimentation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Future avenues inLearning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Honey bee ecology demands they make both rapid and accurate assessments of which flowers are most likely to offer them nectar or pollen. To understand the mechanisms of honey bee decision-making, we examined their speed and accuracy of both flower acceptance and rejection decisions. We used a controlled flight arena that varied both the likelihood of a stimulus offering reward and punishment and the quality of evidence for stimuli. We found that the sophistication of honey bee decision-making rivalled that reported for primates. Their decisions were sensitive to both the quality and reliability of evidence. Acceptance responses had higher accuracy than rejection responses and were more sensitive to changes in available evidence and reward likelihood. Fast acceptances were more likely to be correct than slower acceptances; a phenomenon also seen in primates and indicative that the evidence threshold for a decision changes dynamically with sampling time. To investigate the minimally sufficient circuitry required for these decision-making capacities, we developed a novel model of decision-making. Our model can be mapped to known pathways in the insect brain and is neurobiologically plausible. Our model proposes a system for robust autonomous decision-making with potential application in robotics.
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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.