Absence of food alternatives promotes risk-prone feeding of unpalatable substances in honey bees

The question of why animals sometimes ingest noxious substances is crucial to understand unknown determinants of feeding behaviour. Research on risk-prone feeding behaviour has largely focused on energy budgets as animals with low energy budgets tend to ingest more aversive substances. A less explored possibility is that risk-prone feeding arises from the absence of alternative feeding options, irrespectively of energy budgets. Here we contrasted these two hypotheses in late-fall and winter honey bees. We determined the toxicity of various feeding treatments and showed that when bees can choose between sucrose solution and a mixture of this sucrose solution and a noxious/unpalatable substance, they prefer the pure sucrose solution and reject the mixtures, irrespective of their energy budget. Yet, when bees were presented with a single feeding option and their escape possibilities were reduced, they consumed unexpectedly some of the previously rejected mixtures, independently of their energy budget. These findings are interpreted as a case of feeding helplessness, in which bees behave as if it were utterly helpless to avoid the potentially noxious food and consume it. They suggest that depriving bees of variable natural food sources may have the undesired consequence of increasing their acceptance of food that would be otherwise rejected.