Bees, just like human shoppers, exhibit irrational biases when choosing which flowers to feed on. This article explores the fascinating parallels between the decision-making processes of bees and humans, revealing the intriguing ways in which both species make choices that defy logic.
The Bee Grocery Store Dilemma
When foraging in meadows, this can be similar to when humans are shopping at the bread counter of a supermarket. The flowers are also working hard to ensure that the bees will visit them soon, and the bees have to decide where they can find food but it might not always be an easy choice. Flowers provide two kinds of food: nectar and pollen, and there are crucial differences between the two. Nectar, for example, can vary in concentration, volume, rate of replenishment and availability as well as be rich in secondary metabolites that are either attractive or unpleasing. The form of proteins and lipids in the pollen also influences its protein content.
You might expect that bees would always choose the flowers with the best and most easily accessible nectar and pollen — but you’d be wrong. As a result, they, like the human grocery shoppers of the research team above, base their flower-foraging decisions not on the overall caloric content of flowers but instead strictly on recent experience with similar plants and which competitor foods happen to be available out in species-rich prairies. It is a wonderful piece of irrational behavior that arguably tells us as much about the cognitive processes driving decision-making in bees and humans alike
Perceptions and Options: Illogical Inclinations of Bees and Humans
Bees share humans’ penchant for illogical decision-making, it appears. A person who wins $5 on a scratch ticket after taking down $1 can be filled with joy while another person winning $5 off the same ticket may be disappointed if they just won $10. The result is the same, but perspective shifts based on what precedes[Anyways, I know you get the idea.
Bees show similar perceptual biases. For example a study in 2005 found that bees trained to visit a feeder with medium quality nectar drank it, however low quality nectar drinking was stopped almost immediately in all groups and fasting occurred later or never. This implies that bees, akin to humans too compare their alternatives against them based on what they have experienced recently.
The researchers also discovered that the bees’ preferences can be manipulated by providing context for their choices. For instance, in a bumblebee choice test between two equally attractive flowers — one with high sugar concentration but slow-to-refill nectar or the other with low sugar that quickly replenished — would hungry workers be more consistent at being good foragers by selecting less rewarding but quicker refilling 0r they show inconsistencies. For the bees, a third option—this one rewarded with even less sugar—increased the relative preference for that medium-reward bloom, implying that the choices available can sway foraging decisions in multiple species.
Conclusion
Its study carries significance twofold: in our broadening understanding of animal behavior, on the one hand, but parallelly too for insights it might reveal into our own human nature. This study could potentially help farmers find ways to optimize their cropped realms similarly to how supermarkets place goods on shelves in order influence consumer decisions, by learning from the bees and other pollinators making foraging choices. The more we uncover about the mysteries of animal cognition, the more profound an impact those discoveries stand to have on how we think about our world and ourselves.
