Abstract
Bees efficiently learn asocial and social cues to optimize foraging from fluctuating floral resources. However, it remains unclear how bees respond to divergent sources of social information, and whether such social cues might modify bees’ natural preferences for asocial cues (e.g. flower colour), hence affecting foraging decisions. Here, we investigated honeybees’ (Apis mellifera) inspection and choices of unfamiliar flowers based on both natural colour preferences and simultaneous foraging information from conspecifics and heterospecifics. Individual honeybees’ preferences for flowers were recorded when the reward levels of a learned flower type have declined and novel-coloured flowers were available where they would find either no social information or one conspecific and one heterospecific (Bombus terrestris), each foraging from a different coloured flower (either magenta or yellow). Honeybees were found to have a natural preference for magenta flowers. Social information affected honeybees’ inspection time of both types of flowers, i.e., honeybees modified their approaching flights to yellow and magenta flowers in response to conspecific and heterospecific social information. The presence of either demonstrator on the less-preferred yellow flower increased honeybees’ inspection time of yellow flowers. Conspecific social information influenced observers’ foraging choices of yellow flowers, thus outweighing their original preference for magenta flowers, such an influence was not elicited by heterospecific social information. Our results indicate that flower colour preferences of honeybees are rapidly adjusted in response to conspecific social information, which in turn is preferred over heterospecific information, thus favouring the transmission of adaptive foraging information within species.