Sampling and decision rules used by honey bees in a foraging arena |
| |
Authors: | Dhruba Naug H S Arathi |
| |
Institution: | (1) Department of Biology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA |
| |
Abstract: | Animals must continuously choose among various available options to exploit the most profitable resource. They also need to
keep themselves updated about the values of all available options, since their relative values can change quickly due to depletion
or exploitation by competitors. While the sampling and decision rules by which foragers profitably exploit a flower patch
have attracted a great deal of attention in theory and experiments with bumble bees, similar rules for honey bee foragers,
which face similar foraging challenges, are not as well studied. By presenting foragers of the honey bee Apis cerana with choice tests in a foraging arena and recording their behavior, we investigate possible sampling and decision rules that
the foragers use to choose one option over another and to track other options. We show that a large part of the sampling and
decision-making process of a foraging honey bee can be explained by decomposing the choice behavior into dichotomous decision
points and incorporating the cost of sampling. The results suggest that a honey bee forager, by using a few simple rules as
part of a Bayesian inference process, is able to effectively deal with the complex task of successfully exploiting foraging
patches that consist of dynamic and multiple options. |
| |
Keywords: | Foraging Sampling Resource tracking Decision rules Honey bees Apis cerana |
本文献已被 PubMed SpringerLink 等数据库收录! |
|