Any foraging animal is expected to allocate its efforts among resource patches that vary in quality across time and space. For social insects, this problem is shifted to the colony level: the task of allocating foraging workers to the best patches currently available. To deal with this task, honeybees rely upon differential recruitment via the dance language, while some ants use differential recruitment on odor trails. Bumblebees, close relatives of honeybees, should also benefit from optimizing spatial allocation but lack any targeted recruitment system. How bumblebees solve this problem is thus of immense interest to evolutionary biologists studying collective behavior. It has been thought that bumblebees could solve the spatial allocation problem by relying on the summed individual decisions of foragers, who occasionally sample and shift to alternative resources. We use field experiments to test the hypothesis that bumblebees augment individual exploration with social information. Specifically, we provide behavioral evidence that, when higher-concentration sucrose arrives at the nest, employed foragers abandon their patches to begin searching for the better option; they are more likely to accept novel resources if they match the quality of the sucrose solution experienced in the nest. We explored this strategy further by building an agent-based model of bumblebee foraging. This model supports the hypothesis that using social information to inform search decisions is advantageous over individual search alone. Our results show that bumblebees use a collective foraging strategy built on social modulation of individual decisions, providing further insight into the evolution of collective behavior.

中文翻译：

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大黄蜂中没有空间募集的空间分配

预计任何觅食动物都应在质量随时间和空间变化的资源块之间分配其工作量。对于社交昆虫而言，这个问题已转移到殖民地一级：将觅食工人分配给当前可用的最佳区域的任务。为了完成这项任务，蜜蜂通过舞蹈语言依靠差异募集，而一些蚂蚁在气味踪迹上采用差异募集。大黄蜂（蜜蜂的近亲）也应该从优化空间分配中受益，但缺乏任何针对性的招募制度。因此，大黄蜂如何解决这个问题对于研究集体行为的进化生物学家来说具有极大的意义。人们曾认为，大黄蜂可以依靠觅食者的综合个人决定来解决空间分配问题，偶尔会取样并转移到其他资源。我们使用现场实验来检验大黄蜂通过社交信息增强个人探索的假设。具体而言，我们提供了行为证据，即当较高浓度的蔗糖到达巢穴时，受雇的觅食者放弃了补丁，开始寻找更好的选择。如果它们与巢中使用的蔗糖溶液的质量相匹配，则他们更有可能接受新颖的资源。我们通过建立基于代理的大黄蜂觅食模型来进一步探索该策略。该模型支持以下假设：使用社交信息来告知搜索决策优于单独进行搜索。我们的结果表明，大黄蜂使用基于个体决策的社会调节的集体觅食策略，