Central place foraging pollinators, such as bees, tend to learn multi-destination routes (traplines) to efficiently visit known feeding locations and return to their nest. To what extent these routing behaviours are shared across species is unknown. Here we ran laboratory experiments to compare trapline formation and efficiency by foragers of two social bee species that differ in their collective foraging strategies: the solo foraging bumblebee Bombus terrestris and the mass foraging honey bee Apis mellifera. In a simple routing task with four artificial flowers, both bumblebees and honey bees developed a stable route, although honey bees were slower and less efficient to do so. In a more complex routing task with six flowers, only bumblebees developed a stable route. Honey bees took a longer time to discover all flowers and never integrated them in a single route. Simulations of a model of trapline formation show that these inter-specific differences can be replicated by adjusting the strength of a single learning parameter. Comparing bumblebees and honey bees in the same experimental conditions thus revealed key differences in their spatial foraging strategies, potentially driven by social constraints.

中文翻译：

---

大黄蜂比蜜蜂养成更有效的陷阱

蜜蜂等授粉媒介的觅食中心往往倾向于学习多目的地路线（陷阱路线），以有效地探访已知的觅食地点并返回其巢穴。这些路由行为在物种间共享的程度尚不清楚。在这里，我们进行了实验室实验，比较了两种集体采食策略不同的社会蜜蜂物种的觅食者的陷阱线形成和效率：单独觅食的大黄蜂Bombus terrestris和大规模觅食的蜜蜂Apis mellifera。在带有四个人造花的简单路由任务中，大黄蜂和蜜蜂都开发了稳定的路由，尽管蜜蜂速度较慢且效率较低。在具有六朵花的更复杂的路由任务中，只有大黄蜂才开发出稳定的路由。蜜蜂花了较长时间才能发现所有花朵，并且从未将它们整合到一条路线中。陷阱形成模型的仿真表明，可以通过调整单个学习参数的强度来复制这些种间差异。因此，在相同的实验条件下对大黄蜂和蜜蜂进行比较，发现它们的空间觅食策略存在关键差异，这可能是受社会制约因素驱动的。