Two recent published papers have supported the concept that bees can acquire
knowledge and prowess in almost human like fashion from other colony members,
and thus approximate human cultural learning. This goes against the status quo
of considering insects to have fairly limited mental capacities and following
fairly simple rules of behavior and learning.  

  

The bumble bee experiment ostensibly demonstrates that naive bumblebees can
follow "dominant" ones who have already learned to associate pushing on a
color lever with a reward in an artificial feeding dish arrangement. See
picture of the feeder in article reviewing the paper:  

  

<https://tinyurl.com/3vwhh6nr>  

  

<https://scitechdaily.com/bees-learn-by-watching-others-puzzle-solving-
behavior-spreads-through-bumblebee-colonies/>  

  

  

The honey bee experiment (made the front cover of Science) showed that workers
first dancing to an artificial reward had higher variation in their dance
components in colonies where they had not been exposed to experienced dancers,
when compared to situations where there had been experienced dancers in the
colony.  

  

Two red flags come up for me when looking at the setups for these two
experiments:  

  

1) For the bumble bee lever pushing experiment, the Materials and Methods are
long and complicated, but there does not seem to be an acknowledgement or
correction for possible effects of scent marking by prior visits to a
successful lever location in the feeders. An effect from marks left behind
could create the appearance that new foragers learned to push the rewarding
lever, when in fact they may have simply been following an odor.  

  

2) For the honey bee learning by "watching" other dancers experiment,
experimental colonies were made by creating a single cohort colony out of
newly emerged workers so that when workers first started dancing they had not
encountered dancing bees prior to that. Age based behavior and physiology are
known to be greatly affected by interruptions or unusual age structures in
colonies. Could the higher variability in dance components by new dancers in
single cohort colonies have been caused by such factors rather than lack of
"watching" other dancers prior to dancing?  

  

  


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