Bumblebees know where to go

Honeybees have an elaborate language of dance to pass on news about the best places for nectar. Their more solitary cousins, the bumblebees, were always supposed to forage for themselves. They don't, according to Elli Leadbeater and Lars Chittka of Queen Mary, University of London, reporting in Current Biology.

The bumbles go where the buzz is, and save valuable time. In other words, they follow other bees. The two researchers tested their "volunteers" with a choice of artificial flowers, each carrying the same burden of sugar solution. They found that the bees much preferred to visit flowers where another bee was already at work, rather than buzz around for themselves.

But they copied each other only when they knew nothing about the flower species they were visiting. When the petals looked familiar, they made their own decisions. "Bumblebees in the wild have a daunting task to achieve, because flower nectar levels are often unpredictable, and each forager will have to try out many empty flowers in the course of their search," says Leadbeater. "We don't yet know if bees improve their success rates by copying the choices of others, but bees that do this might have learnt an efficient shortcut to success."