Data from: Influence of preexisting preference for color on sampling and tracking behavior in bumble bees

Animals reduce uncertainty in their lifetime by using information to guide
decision making. Information available can be inherited from the past or
gathered from the present. Therefore, animals must balance inherited
biases with new information that may be in conflict with those potential
biases. In our study, we set up color pairings such that an arbitrarily
chosen focal color, human-orange, would result in an inherent bias in
comparison to three other colors tested resulting in equal, medium, and
strong preference differences. We chose color pairings through a series of
preferences tests across 8 colonies of bumblebees. We subsequently used
these pairings with rewards that varied in quality (good or bad states)
and consistency (steady and fluctuating) in order to investigate how
inherited biases affect the foraging choices of bumblebees when new
information is gathered. We found that the pre-existing color biases
within our bees were only maintained when the reward associated with those
colors was steady, even if paired with mediocre sugar concentrations. When
maintained, we observed that other aspects of bee choice also reflected
this bias, including increased sampling for the preferred color and an
increased likelihood of choosing that color in a subsequent choice. Thus,
environmental change and reward differences interact with the level of
pre-existing bias to determine whether inherited information is more
heavily weighted than newly gathered information, and even a strong
pre-existing bias can be quickly erased with experience under some
conditions.