| dc.description.abstract | Social preference for conspecifics is a fundamental part of social behavior,and emerges in almost all reproducing species. It is essential in understanding and researching more complex forms of social behavior in any organism. Previous studies have looked at how bumblebees relate and respond to social information in comparison to personal experience in foraging situations, but few studies have tried to isolate social preference as a dependent variable. In this replicational study a colony of bumblebees were shaped into foraging for sucrose-solution in a Y-Maze. During the experiments a bumblebee-subject were a presented with a social stimulus, in the form of a bumblebee from the same colony inside of a grided box next to where the sucrose-solution was normally delivered. The bumblebee-subject could move freely around the apparatus, and it would be considered to demonstrate social preference if it spent more than 25 % of its time inside the arm with the social stimulus during a test of two minutes when sucrose-solution was not available. Six experiments were included in this study. Social preferences were observed in two bumblebees during the first out of four tests, but the rest of the subjects they spent less than 25 % of their time in the social stimulus arm throughout all the tests. Social preference might be observed in the second baseline in three of the bumblebees, but the results are inconclusive. Possible explanations for the lack of social preference are discussed, suggestions for changes to the experimental procedure are presented. | en_US |
