In his lab, Gegear conducts experiments with plastic fowers that he can selectively fll with nectar
to observe how bees make choices about which fowers to visit and in what order. He has shown that
bees have a high degree of mental fexibility that enables them to learn from prior experiences and
maximize the amount of food they take back to the hive.
How smart are bees? It's long been known that they can
remember sensory information, and it's easy to demonstrate
how quickly they can learn the characteristics of fowers
that yield the best payoff. In fact, it takes only one or two
trials to teach a bee to associate a particular petal shape or
color with a sweet sucrose reward. Some bees learn special
tricks to release the petals of locked fowers, or to crawl
deep inside a bloom to get at nectar hidden in a mazelike
structure. "They're not born knowing how to do this," Gegear
says, "but through trial and error they will fgure out and
remember very complex motor patterns."
BEE-HAVIOR AND BIOLOGY
By observing pollinators in the wild and documenting their
responses to controlled environments, Gegear has mapped
the economics of their energy-gathering enterprise. In the
lab, he constructs arrays of potted or artifcial fowers to
analyze what happens when bumblebees pit factors such as
nectar volume or concentration against the "costs" of travel
time and energy. It turns out that bees are quite skilled at
deciding when it's benefcial to specialize in high-yield
fowers, and when it pays to fy farther afeld to visit a larger
number of plants.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute > 13