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<\/a>Figure 1. Goldenrod crab spider with captured bumblebee.<\/p><\/div>\n
Luckily, most of the attacks are unsuccessful, giving bees the opportunity to learn and avoid the location of dangerous floral patches. Dawson and Chittka (2014) state that although personal sampling of an environment may impose severe fitness costs, there is more benefit in using information from other individuals as a means to bypass these costs. Previous evidence has found that pollinating bees use social information to avoid predation by relaying the threat to nest-mates or identifying the sites where other individuals were attacked. Unfortunately, a problem arises with these social strategies because bees can only account for the interactions with predators that occurred recently.<\/p>\n
So, this led Dawson and Chittka (2014) to propose a \u201cscenario where bumblebees identify safe food sources by joining feeding conspecifics.\u201d In a prior study, these researchers found that bees learned to avoid both camouflaged and highly visible spiders equally well\u2014and very quickly.<\/p>\n
You can see a video of this in an artificial meadow\u00a0here: http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/sci\/tech\/7596808.stm<\/a><\/p>\n In this current study, they found that bees are highly successful in learning to associate flower colors with safety and danger (Fig. 2). It turns out that the environment had a significant effect on whether bees would join other bees or not. Hesitation would be seen in front of flowers that were unoccupied by nestmates, but if the flower was safe then many bees would be observed, leading to the notion that bees acquire social foraging experience. The researchers also attempted to provide sucrose as a reward on both dangerous and safe flowers, and still found significant preference to join the flower occupied by other conspecifics.<\/p>\n Figure 2. Proportion of bees, in the various treatment groups, that landed on the occupied flower.<\/p><\/div>\n Based on individual previous experiences, bees choose to feed with other individuals so as to avoid the risk of predation. Social information can be ignored when no threat is detected. This suggests that bumblebees “actively decide when to use social information according to the environmental context” (Dawson and Chittka, 2014).\u00a0We must continue to actively study such behaviors to enhance our understanding of social learning. Interpretation of social information in anti-predator situations reveals \u201cunknown social predator avoidance tactic in pollinators\u201d (Dawson and Chittka, 2014).<\/p>\n As for the larger impact, we are currently witnessing the presence of environmental concerns in daily media and bumblebees have become the subject of widespread study. They play a critical role as agricultural pollinators. They seem to be built to pollinate, for the following reasons; can fly at low temperatures; many species have longer tongues than honey bees, so they can pollinate flowers with long, narrow corollas; and they are very hairy, allowing them to pick up and transfer pollen. Thanks to bees we have the current variety flower species, fruits, and vegetables. We must continue to investigate the mechanisms involved in such a tiny, yet important organism.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n References:<\/p>\n Dawson, E.H. and Chittka, L. (2014). Bumblebees (Bombus terrestris<\/em>) use social information as an indicator of safety in dangerous environments.\u00a0Proc. R. Soc. B<\/em>, 281: 20133174<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Prey animals are capable of assessing their surrounding environment for\u00a0any potential threats to their safety.\u00a0Many can form associations between an environmental event and their own response to the event.\u00a0Other members of the same species have “the capacity to glean information … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/scontent-a-lga.xx.fbcdn.net\/hphotos-prn2\/t1.0-9\/10354748_10201348475268860_1975794013579865895_n.jpg\")
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