Interindividual variation in the use of social information during learning in honeybees

Slow-fast differences in cognition among individuals have been proposed to be an outcome of the speed-accuracy trade-off in decision-making. Based on the different costs associated with acquiring information via individual and social learning, we hypothesized that slow-fast cognitive differences would also be tied to the adoption of these different learning modes. Since foragers in honeybee colonies likely have both these information acquisition modes available to them, we chose to test them for inter-individual differences in individual and social learning.

Individual honeybees foragers were presented with a learning task: making a choice between two types of flowers one rewarding (offering sucrose) and one unrewarding (offering water). This task was presented twice: 1) the bee was alone (individual learning) and 2) there was a social cue (model bee) on the correct color. For every individual, the raw data consisted of 20 successive choices between rewarding and unrewarding flowers ...