Elsevier

Learning and Motivation

Volume 42, Issue 1, February 2011, Pages 76-83
Learning and Motivation

The preference for symmetry in flower-naïve and not-so-naïve bumblebees

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lmot.2010.08.009Get rights and content

Abstract

Truly flower-naïve bumblebees, with no prior rewarded experience for visits on any visual patterns outside the colony, were tested for their choice of bilaterally symmetric over asymmetric patterns in a radial-arm maze. No preference for symmetry was found. Prior training with rewarded black and white disks did, however, lead to a significant preference for symmetry. The preference was not specific to symmetry along the vertical axis: a preference for horizontal symmetry was found as well. The results challenge the notion that a preference for bilateral symmetry is unlearned. The preference for symmetry was the product of non-differential conditioning.

Section snippets

Subjects

Four colonies of commercially reared bumblebees (Bombus impatiens Cresson) were purchased from Biobest Biological Systems (Leamington, ON). The number of bees used from each colony and how they were treated is given in Table 1. Outside of training and testing phases, the colonies were given access to sugar solution from a reservoir underneath the colony box. They were also fed pollen ad libitum. The reservoir of sugar solution was capped one or two days before testing to motivate search for

Symmetric vs. asymmetric patterns

Table 3 shows the mean choice frequencies for symmetric and asymmetric patterns for eight bees in each of three colonies. No colony differences were detected (χ2 = 0.59, df = 2). The overall choice proportion of .46 (7.33 choices out of 16) did not differ from a chance value of 50:50 (GP = 3.01, df = 1) and no individual differences were found (GH = 30.53, df = 23).

To address the possibility that there might have been a preference for symmetry in the first few choices that was subsequently “washed out”

Discussion

In this study on truly flower-naïve bumblebees, no evidence for any preference for symmetric patterns was obtained. Our sample size, however, was large enough to detect such an effect. The sample size of 40 untrained bees (three groups of eight bees in Colony 1, one in Colony 2 and one in Colony 3) is larger than that in the study by Rodríguez et al. (2004) where only eight bees were used in their Experiment 1 to detect a preference of 72%, though repeated observations on their bees resulted in

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by research grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council to C.M.S.P. and to C.A.C. We thank Levente Orbán for constructive comments on the manuscript and Pierre Bertrand for the photography.

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