Bumblebees waste no time enjoying the beauty of flowers — instead learning the bare minimum about where to land and find food, new research shows.

A team led by the University of Exeter presented bees with artificial flowers — circles of blue or yellow, or half and half, with sugar solution in the centre.

The artificial flowers were positioned upright, and the flight pattern of bees meant they mostly saw the bottom half of the circles as they came in to land.

When faced with a test circle that had a different arrangement of the two colours, bees paid most attention to whatever colour had appeared in the lower half of the artificial flower they were used to — suggesting they learned just this basic information rather than inspecting and memorising the whole flower prior to landing.

«We know bees have the cognitive capacity to learn a lot of information about a flower,» said Professor Natalie Hempel de Ibarra, Associate Professor at Exeter’s Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour.

«However, our study suggests a simple, low-effort form of learning is good enough in some situations.

Story Source:
Materials provided by University of Exeter. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.