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Adaptive Strategies For Foraging And Their Implications For Flower Constancy, Or: Do Honey Bees Multitask?, Ashley E. Wagner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Classical experiments on honey bee time-memory showed that foragers trained to collect food at a fixed time of day return the following day with remarkable time-accuracy. Previous field experiments revealed that not all foragers return to a food source on unrewarded test days. Rather, there exist 2 subgroups: “persistent” foragers reconnoiter the source; “reticent” foragers wait in the hive for confirmation of source availability. To examine how these foragers contribute to a colony’s ability to reallocate foragers across sources with rapidly changing availabilities, foragers were trained to collect sucrose during a restricted window for several days and observed over 3 …