Standing out in a floral market: early acquisition of pollinators cancels out attractive colors

Flowers with striking colors or scents are often considered to have an advantage in the competition for pollinators. However, if pollinators have a tendency to avoid exploration costs for new floral resources by copying others, flowers may be able to offset their lack of attractiveness by acquiring first visitors before co-flowering species. We tested this idea in an artificial setting that simulates a typical field scenario where bumble bees are motivated to switch from a flower patch with declining resource quality to either of newly emerged flower patches of different colors. In the absence of early foragers in either patch, bees showed a 90% preference for one of the two colors presented. However, this preference dropped to 40% when some early arrivals were added to the nonpreferred color patch. Our study presents a compelling argument against the traditional view that competition for pollinators primarily selects for attractive floral signals, highlighting a more multifaceted and dynamic role of pollinators in this process. This dataset represents the primary results of our cage experiments, i.e., bees' choices for the next target flowers.