The Bees
Cognitive mechanisms of evaluation in bumblebees
Flowers differ in many ways: how much nectar they contain, how concentrated that nectar is, and how reliably rewards can be found. But how do bees actually combine this information when deciding where to forage? Our research examines how bumblebees represent and compare reward value, asking whether bees evaluate resources based on their absolute energetic value or in relation to their previous experiences and available alternatives. We have found that bees can experience positive and negative “incentive contrast,” responding differently to the same reward depending on what they encountered previously. We are now investigating why some reward dimensions, such as nectar concentration, appear to be evaluated differently from others, such as reward rate. Understanding how bees construct value from multiple sources of information provides insight into the cognitive mechanisms underlying pollinator foraging.
Photo by Sheila Chan
When do too many choices become a problem?
Animals rarely forage in environments with only one option. A bee may encounter many flower types that differ in reward quality, and distinguishing among them can require considerable information processing. Our research asks when having more choices actually makes decision-making harder. We have found that bumblebees experience choice overload when flowers provide similar rewards or when the overall quality of the floral environment is low. We are now testing whether this effect depends on the specific information bees must evaluate—for example, differences in nectar volume, sugar concentration, or both. These experiments help us understand how ecological complexity creates cognitive constraints and reveal when animals struggle to make decisions in environments filled with competing alternatives.
The role of metacognition in foraging
Bumblebee colonies divide work among many individuals, with some workers foraging while others perform tasks inside the nest. But how do individual workers come to specialize in different roles? We are investigating whether workers use information about their own performance to determine which tasks they perform. We ask whether successful foragers continue to invest in foraging while less successful individuals shift toward other colony tasks, and whether a worker’s perception of her own success influences future behavior. By linking individual cognition to colony organization, this research explores how seemingly simple decisions by individual insects can produce the flexible division of labor characteristic of social insect colonies.
Illustration by Carley Beyer
Learning in a deceptive world
Not all flowers provide the rewards their signals promise. Floral mimicry and deception are widespread, creating challenging learning problems for pollinators that must decide which flowers are worth visiting. We study how bumblebees learn to distinguish rewarding flowers from deceptive alternatives and how the costs of making mistakes influence their decisions. By manipulating reward size, the consequences of incorrect choices, and perceptual similarity between flowers, we investigate when bees persist in exploiting deceptive opportunities and when they adopt safer foraging strategies. This work connects animal cognition with plant-pollinator evolution, showing how individual pollinator decisions can shape the evolution of floral signals.
