A new study in the journal PLOS Biology finds that bumblebees can actually learn to solve puzzles from one another, suggesting that even some invertebrates like these social insects have a capacity for what we humans call 'culture.'
, a cognitive ethologist who studies wild animal minds at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. This learning can range from navigating a migratory route to using a tool to access a particular food.
"Nobody's really thought to look at it in invertebrates before," she says. Not even in bumblebees, which are social insects that spend a lot of time together."They have some of the most intricate, complex behavioral repertoires in the animal kingdom. Yet people assume that they're mostly driven by innate factors."To study culture in bumblebees in the lab, she first had to train a few industrious bees to perform a novel behavior. She opted for solving a puzzle box.
She trained some bees to head-butt the red tab to get the sugar water and trained others to push the blue tab. Then, Bridges placed these tutor bees inside different colonies, along with the puzzle boxes. Bridges persevered, however, and the experiment ultimately played itself out. In colonies where the tutor bee had originally learned to push the red tab, the other bees in the colony usually pushed the red tab. In colonies where the tutor bee was trained to push the blue tab, their fellow bees tended to do the same.
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