Flower Choice and Learning in Foraging Bumblebees: Effects of Variation in Nectar Volume and Concentration

Many flower visitors, including bumblebees, interact with a diversity of host plants. Proficiency at handling several floral types requires considerable learning ability (reviews by Papaj & Lewis 1993; Menzel 2001). These bees rapidly learn which of several flower species is more profitable and specialize on the more profitable ones. They learn to associate a reward with a flower’s color, pattern, shape, odor, or microtexture. Honeybees memorize the location of a profitable food source and the time of day when the reward is available. Honeybees and bumblebees also possess an impressive capacity to learn how to find and extract rewards from flowers of radically different morphologies (Laverty 1994). External factors involved in associative learning can be categorized by the properties of the cues associated with the reward (i.e., the conditioned stimuli) and the properties of the reward (i.e., the unconditioned Correspondence James D. Thomson, Department of Zoology, University of Toronto, 25 Harbord St., Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 3G5. E-mail: [email protected]