What’s small, buzzes here and there and visits flowers?
If you said bees or hummingbirds, you got
it. And you wouldn’t be the first if you mixed the two up. In Medieval Europe,
some called bees the smallest birds. In Chinese and Japanese, the words for
hummingbird translate into “bee bird.” Today we call the smallest hummingbird —
weighing less than a penny and only a bit larger than the biggest bee — the bee
hummingbird.
And now a group of researchers say we
should embrace our history of lumping the two together. The way scientists
study bees could help them study hummingbird behavior, too, they argue in a
review published Tuesday in Biology Letters.
Scientists first compared the two back in
the 1970s when studying how animals forage. The idea is that animals use a kind
of internal math to make choices in order to minimize the work it takes to earn
maximum rewards. Researchers at the time focused on movement rules, like the
order in which they visited flowers, and where flowers were located relative to
others. It was “almost like an algorithm” for efficient foraging, said David
Pritchard, a biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who led the
review. Hummingbirds and bees had similar solutions.
You’re a Bee. This Is What It Feels Like.
We’re taking you on a journey to help you
understand how bees, while hunting for pollen, use all of their senses — taste,
touch, smell and more — to decide what to pick up and bring home.
But the study of optimal foraging, as it
was called, overlooked what animals learned about their environments. Bees
decipher which flowers are more rewarding than others. They learn about color
and how to manipulate a flower among other information. Decades before the
concept of optimal foraging, Frank Bené, an American ornithologist, discovered
that hummingbirds learned about color too, contrary to the belief that they
were innately attracted to red. Hummingbirds also remembered locations of
feeders that he moved in his garden.
As the field of animal cognition emerged,
hummingbird and bee research diverged. Neuroscientists and behavioral
ecologists developed ways to study bee behavior in naturalistic settings.
Hummingbird researchers compared hummingbirds to other birds and borrowed
methods from psychology to study their capacity to learn in the lab.
To be fair, hummingbirds and bees differ.
Hummingbirds have more advanced eyes and brains than bees. Olfaction, while
important for bee memory, has historically been ignored in hummingbirds.
Honeybees and bumblebees are social; hummingbirds typically aren’t. Bees rely
solely on flowers for nectar and pollen; hummingbirds also eat insects, which
may require that their brains work differently, Beth Nichols who studies bee
behavior at the University of Sussex in Britain wrote in an email.
But however they perceive or process
information, they both experience similar information, Dr. Pritchard said. Bees
and hummingbirds approach flowers that distribute food predictably in time in
space, so he and his colleagues have turned to these animals’ commonalities.
Can You Pick the Bees Out of This Insect
Lineup?
How can we save the pollinators if we
don’t even recognize them?
In day-to-day foraging, for instance,
hummingbirds may rely on more of a bee’s-eye view than a bird’s-eye view. Like
other birds, they rely on landmarks, distances and directions to make maps when
migrating long distances, but they don’t use these cues to find flowers. Move a
flower just an inch or so away from where a hummingbird thought it was and it
will hover over the flower’s original location. Dr. Pritchard is investigating
if, like bees, hummingbirds engage in view matching — hovering, scanning snapshots
of a place to its memory and using those as references later.
Like bees, hummingbirds also create
repeated routes between flowers during feeding, as a trapper might check traps.
In the lab they learn arbitrary sequences, following one flower to the next
over hundreds of trials. But they won’t do it in nature. Taking methods from
bee work, however, researchers put hummingbirds in an arena of artificial
flowers that refilled with nectar like flowers in the wild. Like bees that find
the fastest way to nectar-rich flowers on their own, hummingbirds also found
the most efficient paths, rather than following the order in which researchers
had presented flowers
Ultimately, Dr. Pritchard said, advances
in our understanding of an animal can come from unexpected places.
“The idea of getting inspiration from
insects to study birds and mammals is something that doesn’t happen very
often.”
