Bees are model organisms for the study of learning and memory, yet nearly all such research to date has used a single reward, nectar. Many bees collect both nectar (carbohydrates) and pollen (protein) on a single foraging bout, sometimes from different plant species. We tested whether individual bumblebees could learn colour associations with nectar and pollen rewards simultaneously in a foraging scenario where one floral type offered only nectar and the other only pollen. We found that bees readily learned multiple reward–colour associations, and when presented with novel floral targets generalized to colours similar to those trained for each reward type. These results expand the ecological significance of work on bee learning and raise new questions regarding the cognitive ecology of pollination.

All learning data for experiment and summaryThe first tab is a summary of all bees used and what they did (bees that did not collect nectar or pollen or only collected small amounts of one were not included in main learning analysis). The second tab is all behavioural data with key in text box.all data_Dryad.xlsx