Honey Bees Can Use Sequence Learning to Predict Rewards from a Prior Unrewarded Visual Stimulus

TL;DR

Honey bees can learn sequences of visual cues to predict which food sources will be rewarding, even when the cues alternate over several minutes.

Contribution

This study shows honey bees can learn and anticipate reward sequences over several minutes, a longer time scale than previously demonstrated.

Findings

Bees learned to predict which feeder would be rewarding based on a prior unrewarded visual cue.

Bees made 64% correct choices in the second half of their visit sequence, showing improvement with experience.

Abstract

Honey bees navigate complex environments and make decisions about where to find food. This study investigates whether they can learn a sequence of events to predict future rewards. We trained honey bees to recognize a pattern in which a previously unrewarded visual cue became rewarding on the next visit. Our results showed that bees could anticipate which food source would be rewarding more often than expected by chance, demonstrating an ability to learn sequences over several minutes. Understanding how bees process information and make foraging decisions provides insights into their cognitive abilities, which are important for pollination and ecosystem health. This research highlights the cognitive flexibility of learning and decision-making in pollinators.

Learning to anticipate upcoming events can increase fitness by allowing animals to choose the best course of action, and many species can learn sequences of events and anticipate rewards. To date, most studies have focused on sequences over short time scales such as a few seconds. Whereas events separated by a few seconds are easily learned, events separated by longer delays are typically more difficult to learn. Here, we show that honey bees (Apis mellifera) can learn a sequence of two visually distinct food sources alternating in profitability every few minutes. Bees were challenged to learn that the rewarded pattern was the one that was non-rewarded on the prior visit. We show that bees can predict and choose the feeder that will be rewarding upon their next approach more frequently than predicted by chance, and they improve with experience, with 64% correct choices made in the second half of their visit sequence (N = 320 visits by 20 different bees). These results increase our understanding of honey bee visual sequential learning and further demonstrate the flexibility of foragers’ learning strategies.

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