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 d..., , , # Standing out in a floral market: early acquisition of pollinators cancels out attractive colors

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.qfttdz0qv](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.qfttdz0qv)

## Description of the data and file structure

This dataset contains a single CSV file that describes the results of cage experiments conducted in our study. We investigated how the presence or absence of early-arrived conspecifics on newly emerged flower patches affects bees’ decision for the next foraging target with different floral colors.

The file provides information about the experimental condition (i.e., the presence or absence of early arrivals on the newly emerged patches, and the set of floral colors used for bees' new foraging options) and the resulting bee's patch choice in each trial.

`CageExpData.csv`

Raw data of the bees’ patch choice in each treatment. The followings are the explanation of each column.

* beeID: ID of the test bee.
* colony: ID of the colony that the test bee belonge...