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, patte...

The yield of animal-pollinated crops is threatened by bee declines, but its precise sensitivity is poorly known. We therefore determined the yield dependence of Hokkaido pumpkin in Germany on insect pollination by quantifying: (i) the relationship between pollen receipt and fruit set and (ii) the cumulative pollen deposition of each pollinator group. We found that approximately 2500 pollen grai...

To understand the relative benefits of social and personal information use in foraging decisions, we developed an agent-based model of social learning that predicts social information should be more adaptive where resources are highly variable and personal information where resources vary little. We tested our predictions with bumblebees and found that foragers relied more on social information...

Untrained, "flower-naïve" bumblebees display behavioural preferences when presented with visual properties such as colour, symmetry, spatial frequency and others. Two unsupervised neural networks were implemented to understand the extent to which these models capture elements of bumblebees' unlearned visual preferences towards flower-like visual properties. The computational models, which are v...

The ecology of all bumblebees (Bombus spp.) is similar, yet some species have declined greatly while others remain abundant. We examine whether abundance is related to diet breadth. The floral visits of bumblebees were examined on Salisbury Plain, UK. All of the species examined gathered pollen mostly from Fabaceae. All species gathered nectar from a broader range of flowers than they did polle...

We provide evidence for interspecific differences in the behaviour of bumblebees which suggests that there may be important differences in the way that they navigate. Bumblebees commonly investigate the novel landmark presented by a human standing in open countryside. When doing so they perform a characteristic flight similar to that observed when a naïve bee first leaves the nest, suggesting t...

Many bumblebee (Bombus) species are thought to have declined in abundance in the last 50 years, while a small number of species remain abundant. Here we examine which factors render some British bumblebee species more susceptible to environmental change than others. We present forage data on workers of 15 bumblebee species gathered from 172 one hour searches conducted at sites in southern UK, t...