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Trapped: Assessing Attractiveness of Potential Food Sources to Bumblebees

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Abstract

Unrewarding artificial flowers that trapped approaching bumblebees were used here for the first time to assess the effects of several floral characteristics on floral attractiveness to bumblebees that never obtained food from flowers. Floral size and floral scent had no discernable effect. In a comparison between two colors (white and blue) and two shapes (radial and square), choice proportions for blue radial flowers were significantly greater than chance. Our proposed method is an alternative to prior training, with food associated either with visual or olfactory stimuli, which is unnecessary to obtain floral preferences by free-flying bumblebees exploring potential food sources.

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Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Bill Stephen for giving us a model artificial flower and to Charles Collin and Ricardo Tabone for their assistance with the colorimetry. Thanks also to Pierre Bertrand for the photographs and Levente Orbán with help with the filming. Jonathan Hudon and Levente Orbán provided constructive criticism on the manuscript. This research was supported by a research grant to C.M.S.P. from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and a donation by the Canadian Wildlife Federation.

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  1. School of Psychology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, K1N 6N5, Canada

    T. M. Hudon & C. M. S. Plowright

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  1. T. M. Hudon
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  2. C. M. S. Plowright
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Correspondence to C. M. S. Plowright.

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Hudon, T.M., Plowright, C.M.S. Trapped: Assessing Attractiveness of Potential Food Sources to Bumblebees. J Insect Behav 24, 144–158 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10905-010-9243-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10905-010-9243-7

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