Bees and the travelling salesman problem: how tiny brains solve complex cognitive tasks
Lead Research Organisation:
Queen Mary University of London
Department Name: Sch of Biological and Chemical Sciences
Abstract
Traffic clogged roads, congested mobile phone networks ¿ supercomputers running day and night to find the best route for cars and information. But we know that they don¿t always get it right, despite being very powerful. Bees have to find routes between flowers every day when finding food, and without computer help. How do they choose which flowers to visit, and in what order? Bees don¿t just have to visit flowers, they have to remember which have the most nectar, and visit them without wasting energy flying the long way round. Their route may not be perfect, but we hope it will help us find good routes through complex networks more easily. We will look at how bees remember which flowers are good to visit from day-to-day, and how it learns the location of flowers and best order to visit them. We will also look at whether they always visit flowers in the same order they discovered them, and how landmarks help them to retrace their steps. Finally, we will look at how bees cope when the amount of nectar in flowers changes, or there are other bees feeding from the same flowers.
Publications
Chittka L
(2009)
Speed-accuracy tradeoffs in animal decision making.
in Trends in ecology & evolution
Lihoreau M
(2010)
Travel optimization by foraging bumblebees through readjustments of traplines after discovery of new feeding locations.
in The American naturalist
Lihoreau M
(2011)
Trade-off between travel distance and prioritization of high-reward sites in traplining bumblebees.
in Functional ecology
Lihoreau M
(2016)
Signatures of a globally optimal searching strategy in the three-dimensional foraging flights of bumblebees.
in Scientific reports
Lihoreau M
(2016)
Monitoring Flower Visitation Networks and Interactions between Pairs of Bumble Bees in a Large Outdoor Flight Cage.
in PloS one
Lihoreau M
(2012)
Bees do not use nearest-neighbour rules for optimization of multi-location routes.
in Biology letters
Lihoreau M
(2014)
Unravelling the mechanisms of trapline foraging in bees
in Communicative & Integrative Biology
Pasquaretta C
(2019)
A spatial network analysis of resource partitioning between bumblebees foraging on artificial flowers in a flight cage.
in Movement ecology
Raine NE
(2009)
Geographic profiling applied to testing models of bumble-bee foraging.
in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface
| Description | 1. We have demonstrated that bees are able to modify the foraging routes they follow in a way that minimises the distances flown. Bees are capable of this sort of route optimisation performance when the spatial distribution of flowers changes over time, suggesting that they are capable of dealing with relatively complex dynamic routing problems. 2. We have pioneered experiments to examine how bees form foraging routes, use them and optimise the distance flown at ecologically relevant scales. Work conducted in an outdoor flight cage (ca. 50 x 25m), using arrays of automatically refilling artificial flowers monitored by motion sensitive video cameras, is being written up for publication. These experiments will show how the foraging routes of bees are affected by competition for the nectar rewards provided by flowers. 3. Using ground-based harmonic radar we have monitored the flight patterns of free-flying bumblebees foraging on an array of artificial flowers. This experiment provides entirely novel information on the search patterns bees use to form a repeatable foraging route (trapline) and also how bees respond when one of the flowers they normally visit ceases to produce rewards at an ecologically relevant spatial scale. |
| Exploitation Route | n/a |
| Sectors | Environment |
| URL | http://chittkalab.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk/Pub.html |