A spatial network analysis of resource partitioning between bumblebees foraging on artificial flowers in a flight cage.

Background: Individual bees exhibit complex movement patterns to efficiently exploit small areas within larger plant populations. How such individual spatial behaviours scale up to the collective level, when several foragers visit a common area, has remained challenging to investigate, both because of the low resolution of field movement data and the limited power of the statistical descriptors to analyse them. To tackle these issues we video recorded all flower visits ( N  = 6205), and every interaction on flowers ( N  = 628), involving foragers from a bumblebee ( Bombus terrestris ) colony in a large outdoor flight cage (880 m2 ), containing ten artificial flowers, collected on five consecutive days, and analysed bee movements using networks statistics.

Results: Bee-flower visitation networks were significantly more modular than expected by chance, indicating that foragers minimized overlaps in their patterns of flower visits. Resource partitioning emerged from differences in foraging experience among bees, and from outcomes of their interactions on flowers. Less experienced foragers showed lower activity and were more faithful to some flowers, whereas more experienced foragers explored the flower array more extensively. Furthermore, bees avoided returning to flowers from which they had recently been displaced by a nestmate, suggesting that bees integrate memories of past interactions into their foraging decisions.

Conclusion: Our observations, under high levels of competition in a flight cage, suggest that the continuous turnover of foragers observed in colonies can led to efficient resource partitioning among bees in natural conditions.