UC San Diego

Learning visual information is crucial for many animal species. Honey bees are a social species that forages daily and relies on visual information to navigate from nest to food sources and back. The ever-changing environment demands foragers to learn and adapt to new conditions in order to efficiently exploit available resources. By training honey bees to artificial flowers, we investigated how changing the visual characteristics of the food source (surrounding landmarks, distance from the hive, and timing of rewards at visually distinct sources) leads to behavioral changes in honey bees. We found that bees rely heavily on shape and color of food sources and surrounding landmarks to decide where to land. They reduce their efforts in recruiting other bees to the same food source when the landmarks around the food source change. We found that bees can learn temporal regularities in the profitability of different visual patterns. Finally, we propose a new method to consistently measure and annotate the communicatory signals of honey bees to better understand how the measurement of distance by flying foragers results in particular walking movements in the hive.