Bees social learning

A study at Queen Mary University has shown that bumblebees can teach other bumblebees complex tasks. They can learn to solve problems and pass their knowledge on to others. A sugar water reward was put in a box and the bees had to push a blue lever that was blocking a red lever and then push the red lever to get the reward. This is a difficult task for them. They had to be trained to do this by being offered separate rewards for the two steps. The trained bees were then paired with bees who had never seen the puzzle and the reward for the first step was removed. Some of the untrained bees were able to learn both steps of the puzzle by watching the trained bees. Learning something in this way is complex behaviour and known as cumulative culture, something once thought to be unique to humans.

Jane