Just because you ’re the smart bee in the beehive , does n’t signify you ’ll be any honorable at working . In fact , when it comes to collecting pollen , it often pays to be speechless .
New research by the Royal Holloway in London and the University of Guelph in Canada looked at how bumblebees ' learning power paired up with their forage performance and donation to the colony . The study is published inScientific Reports .
Their resultant showed that slow - see bumblebee scrounge for considerably longer than the bees that were able to learn rapidly during association - building undertaking . There was also no difference in the rates of forage between the two groups of bee , mean the smart one just foraged for less time and were bad at foraging overall .
" This field of study provides the first evidence of a encyclopaedism - consociate price in the wild , " Dr Lisa Evans , Plant & Food Research scientist at Royal Holloway , said in astatement . “Our issue are surprising , because we typically associate enhanced learning performance and cognitive ability with improved fitness , because it is considered beneficial to the survival of an mortal or group . ”
The researchers looked at 85 bees from five different colonies and subject them to a visual learning operation exam that tested how well the bees con which colored flowers contained more pollen than others . radio receiver frequency identification tagging technology was used to track how quickly the bees made the association and how much pollen they compile in the wild .
When it came to adding up how much the bees had the collected , the slower bee were substantially well at collect than the smart bee . This support in opposition to what we incline to assume about bee , as we typically suppose that scholarship is specially important to their winner .
Aprevious discipline in 2008produced opposite results , instead finding that tight - find out bees perform better and were more probable to keep track of which prime hold the most rewards . However , this new study disputes the robustness of those upshot , as the current report stick to the scrounge performance of bee whose learning had previously been assessed , while the old study used unlike individuals . This , the current team say , could have swayed the results as a bumblebee ’s performance can vary look on a settlement ’s developmental microscope stage and a worker ’s reproductive position .
The investigator posit a possible explanation for ther own findings:“Neural tissue paper is metabolically expensive to produce and maintain , " Dr Evans add together . " Foraging is energy demanding , but so is pick up . This may explain the importantly curt forage lifespan of fast - learning bumblebees . "
