CATEGORIZATION OF FOOD TYPES ENHANCES FORAGING PERFORMANCE OF BUMBLEBEES

The classification of food items into a selected set of categories can significantly enhance information processing by a foraging animal. The ability of bumblebees, Bombus flavifrons, to form simple categories of floral colours was tested. Bees recognized categories in a way that enhanced their ability to discriminate between rewarding and non-rewarding flowers. Bees also recognized novel members of learned categories. Both memorization and generalization based on similarity between floral types could be ruled out as the mechanisms underlying bees' behaviour. It is most likely that bees learned to attend to the stimulus that reliably identified members of a certain category; a similar mechanism may be commonly used by many other species including humans.