Bandwagon effects in a floral market: early pollinator acquisition offsets colour disadvantages in less attractive flowers

Flowers with striking colours or scents are often considered to have an advantage in the competition for pollinators. However, if pollinators copy others to avoid exploration costs in changing environments, less attractive flowers may benefit from acquiring early visitors by drawing more subsequent visitors and offsetting their colour disadvantage. Previous studies provide partial support for this view, but mostly focus on pollinator behaviour at small spatial scales rather than on plant benefits in the field.
To investigate whether flowers benefit from acquiring early visitors in attracting subsequent pollinator visits, we conducted a semi-outdoor experiment in a large flight arena designed to replicate the significant information-gathering costs encountered in field conditions. By simulating a typical scenario where bumble bees are motivated to shift from a flower species with declining resource quality to newly blooming ones, we assessed the impact of early arrivals—mimicked by dead ..., , , # Bandwagon effects in a floral market: early pollinator acquisition offsets colour disadvantages in less attractive flowers

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

## Description of the data and file structure

This dataset contains three CSV files that describe 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.

### 1)    CageExpData.csv

Raw data of the bee’s final patch choice and the patch first approached or landed on in each trial. The followings are the explanation of each column.

* BeeID: ID of the test bee.
* Colony: ID of the colony that the test bee belonged to.
* Choice: Bee’s patch choice for the next foraging target (P: Purple, Y: yellow, O: orange, B: blue). For each bee, the patch that it preferentially visited (i.e., spent more time l...,