Assistant Professor University of North Texas Denton, Texas
Animals can better match their behavior to the current environment and increase fitness by usingsocialinformation obtained from observingothers’ interactions with the environment.Social information is used by an array ofinsects in various contexts. Bees will use social information from conspecifics to learn which flowers have nectar and increase their foraging efficiency. Bees commonly interact with diverse heterospecific flower visitorsthat belong to multiple trophic groups including pollinators and nectaring natural enemies. These other speciesmay provide valuable information about nectar availability.Wedetermined how bumble bees (Bombus impatiens) use visual social information from predatory lady beetles (Hippodamia convergens), which consume nectar to increase their reproductive output. Weconducted experiments with laboratory-maintained bumble bees freely flying in arenas to test if they could (1) innately recognize lady beetles as sources of social information about nectar, and (2) learn to use lady beetles to gauge nectar availability. Bees did not innately recognize lady beetles as a source of social information but did recognize conspecifics.Bees appropriately learned to associate conspecifics with the presence and absence of food, however the bees only learned to associate heterospecific lady beetles with the presence of food and not the absence. Thus, bees can acquire social information from species in different trophic levels that havesome resource overlap.However, social information from nectaring predators may not be as relevant to bumble bees as information provided byother pollinators or cognitive constraints may limit how bees use such social information.