title: Male bumblebees perform learning flights on leaving a flower but not when leaving their nest.
abstract: Female bees and wasps demonstrate, through their performance of elaborate learning flights, when and where they memorise features of a significant site. An important feature of these flights is that the insects look back to fixate the site that they are leaving. Females, which forage for nectar and pollen and return with it to the nest, execute learning flights on their initial departure from both their nest and newly discovered flowers. To our knowledge, these flights have so far only been studied in females. Here, we describe and analyse putative learning flights observed in male bumblebeesBombus terrestrisL. Once male bumblebees are mature, they leave their nest for good and fend for themselves. We show that, unlike female foragers, males always fly directly away from their nest, without looking back, in keeping with their indifference to their natal nest. In contrast, after males have drunk from artificial flowers, their flights on first leaving the flowers resemble the learning flights of females, particularly in their fixation of the flowers. These differences in the occurrence of female and male learning flights seem to match the diverse needs of the two sexes to learn about disparate, ecologically relevant places in their surroundings.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour, Department of Psychology, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4QG, UK.
authors.forename: Théo
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Robert
authors.affiliation: Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour, Department of Psychology, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4QG, UK.
authors.forename: Elisa
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Frasnelli
authors.affiliation: School of Life Sciences, John Maynard Smith Building, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QG, UK.
authors.forename: Thomas S
authors.initials: TS
authors.lastname: Collett
authors.affiliation: Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour, Department of Psychology, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4QG, UK n.hempel@exeter.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Natalie
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-0859-8217
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Hempel de Ibarra
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001070:Appetitive Behavior; D001516:Bees / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005426:Flight, Animal; D006702:Homing Behavior; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D000072458:Orientation, Spatial; D012727:Sex Characteristics
keywords: Bee; Eusocial insect; Foraging; Navigation; Sex-specific behaviour; Spatial learning