Discover how bees and humans share surprisingly similar patterns of irrational decision-making when it comes to choosing between options, be it flowers or groceries. Explore the fascinating insights from research that shed light on the surprising parallels between bee and human behavior.
Bee Foraging Choices
As consumers of a veritable buffet of choices at the supermarket, bees foraging in meadows face numerous blooms at once. Whether or not it is a simple decision to make, and the walk/climb still needs to be done
Nectar and pollen are food items that can vary in important ways and flowers give both kinds of food. Nectar, for example, varies in concentration, volume, refill rate and availability. There are secondary metabolites including caffeine and nicotine which can be undesirable or desirable depending on dosage as well. Pollen also contains proteins and lipids, which are nutritionally important.
Faced with these options, you might expect the bees to always choose the flowers that have nectar and pollen that is both easier to get at and tastier. But they don’t. Rather, as we do when choosing groceries, their flower selections are context dependent: which flowers they visited and the alternative flowers available now.
Bees and Humans: What Irrational Acts are At Work here?
In decision making, human is sometimes unreasonable. For example, on a variable reinforcement schedule if someone just won $1 dollars — guesses the right number and wins again — they will be elated to win anything at all- like winning $5 Dollars off of scratch ticket after winning one Dollar; as opposed to becoming disappointed in not winning 10 cents when they assume that there is probability a chance for them. On the other hand, while the result is fundamentally identical, everything that preceded it modifies our perception.
Research in bumblebees has also suggested they assess the quality of individual nectars on the basis of their most recent feeding experience. When bees visited this feeder, they immediately leant to accept medium-quality nectar, whereas some bees that were trained to visit a feeder with high-quality nectar rejected it from the beginning.
The implication is that, as with humans, bees sometimes come up with the wrong answer during an expectation value-metacognitive state. In another test, bumblebees could choose between two equally rewarding flowers: one offering a high concentration of sugar but taking long to refill its nectar reserve; the other needing only little time to resupply with nectar, but containing less sugar in each reward. A third, less-profitable flower also had the effect of making the intermediate one look better by comparison to a bee
Conclusion
Given these surprising similarities, the decision-making heuristics shared by bees and humans become pertinent. The extent of these irrational behaviours in bumblebees and other pollinators could inform on, helping farmers make their crop plantings as privacy-compliant as possible to increase visitation to target crops, like stores stocking shelves with unattractive items next to attractive ones. As we are able to identify similar behavior between bees and humans, this could provide us with an understanding of the intricate decision-making which both animal and human have.
