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<h2><b><font size=3 face=Arial><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Arial'><a
href="http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21576627-strange-case-bandit-bumblebees-bad-beehaviour">http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21576627-strange-case-bandit-bumblebees-bad-beehaviour</a>
<o:p></o:p></span></font></b></h2>
<h2><b><font size=5 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:18.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></b></h2>
<h2><b><font size=5 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:18.0pt'>Entomology<o:p></o:p></span></font></b></h2>
<h3><b><font size=4 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:13.5pt'>Bad
beehaviour<o:p></o:p></span></font></b></h3>
<h1><b><font size=6 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:24.0pt'>The
strange case of the bandit bumblebees<o:p></o:p></span></font></b></h1>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'></hgroup><aside class="floatleft light-grey"><time class="date-created">Apr
27th 2013 </time>|<a href="http://www.economist.com/printedition/2013-04-27">From
the print edition</a> <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
</aside>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><img border=0 width=595 height=335 id="_x0000_i1026"
src="cid:image001.jpg@01CE4754.BBA8F440" title=""><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>TO MOST
people, bumblebees are charming, slightly absurd creatures that blunder through
garden and meadow with neither the steely determination of the honeybee nor the
malevolent intention of the wasp. If you are a plant, though, things look
rather different—for from the point of view of some flowering plants many
bumblebees are nothing more than thieves. They rob them of their nectar and
give nothing in return.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Nectar
robbery, in which a bumblebee carves a hole in the side of a flower as a bank
robber might cut his way into a vault, was discovered by Charles Darwin. This
technique lets bees get at the nectar of flowers whose shapes have evolved to
encourage their pollination by insects with long tongues, which can reach down
narrow tubes.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Some
bumblebees do have such tongues. But some do not. Short-tongued bees are,
however, unwilling to deny themselves the bounty of nectar inside these
flowers. Hence the hole-cutting. By breaking in in this way, though, a
bumblebee nullifies the 100m-year-old pact between flowering plants and
insects: that the plant feeds the insect in exchange for the insect pollinating
the plant.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The
question about nectar robbery that has intrigued biologists from <st1:City
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Darwin</st1:place></st1:City> onwards is whether
the behaviour is innate or learnt. <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Darwin</st1:place></st1:City>,
though he originated the idea that many behaviour patterns are products of
evolution by natural selection, suspected that it is learnt. Insects, in other
words, can copy what other insects get up to. Only now, though, has somebody
proved that this is true.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The
observations were made by David Goulson (then at the <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">University</st1:PlaceType>
of <st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Stirling</st1:PlaceName>, now at the <st1:place
w:st="on"><st1:PlaceType w:st="on">University</st1:PlaceType> of <st1:PlaceName
w:st="on">Sussex</st1:PlaceName></st1:place>), and his colleagues. To test his
ideas he had to go from <st1:country-region w:st="on">Britain</st1:country-region>
to <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Switzerland</st1:place></st1:country-region>,
for only there could he find a flower of the correct shape to conduct the
study.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>His
crucial observation was that when the flowers of an alpine plant called the
yellow rattle are robbed, the entry holes—because of the structure of the
flower—tend to be unambiguously on either the right-hand side or the left-hand
side. Moreover, preliminary observation suggested that the holes in flowers in
a single meadow are often all made on the same side. This led him to speculate
that bumblebees in a particular area do indeed learn the art of nectar robbery
from one another, and then copy the technique with such fidelity that they
always attack a flower from the same side.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=xhead><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Crime
and nourishment<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>His team
monitored 13 alpine meadows during the summers of 2009 and 2011. They
painstakingly recorded the sites of robbery holes in yellow-rattle flowers, and
studied the behaviour of 168 bumblebees. They tried to follow each bee until it
had visited 20 flowers, though they lost sight of some insects before they had
reached this score. If they could, they then captured the insect so as not to
follow it again on another occasion.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Dr
Goulson found, as he reports in <em><i><font face="Times New Roman">Behavioral
Ecology and Sociobiology</font></i></em>, that two short-tongued bumblebee
species which live in the area, <em><i><font face="Times New Roman">Bombus
lucorum</font></i></em> and <em><i><font face="Times New Roman">Bombus
wurflenii</font></i></em>, demonstrated handedness when they robbed flowers.
Moreover, if one species was behaving in (say) a left-handed manner in a
particular meadow, the other was likely to do the same. This suggests that one
species can learn from another—a trick previously thought to be confined
to vertebrates.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Handedness
in any given meadow, Dr Goulson found, increased as the season progressed. But
each summer appeared to start as a blank slate. The handedness that developed
in a meadow in 2009 did not predict its handedness in 2011.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The most
reasonable explanation, Dr Goulson argues, is that each year a few bumblebees
which have learnt the trick of nectar robbery in the previous season come out
of hibernation and start robbing flowers again. By chance, they make more holes
on one side of the flowers than the other, and as the habit is picked up by
other, newly hatched bees, a preference for left or right spreads by a process
of positive feedback. The bees have, in other words, created a simple culture.
It is a criminal culture, admittedly. But no one ever said that nature was
pretty.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face=Arial><span style='font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face=Arial><span style='font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face=Arial><span style='font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>Sunny Boyd</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face=Arial><span style='font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>Communications Manager and Webmaster</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
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