Colour reverse learning and animal personalities: the advantage of behavioural diversity assessed with agent-based simulations

Foraging bees use colour cues to help identify rewarding from unrewarding flowers, but as conditions change, bees may require behavioural flexibility to reverse their learnt preferences. Perceptually similar colours are learnt slowly by honeybees and thus potentially pose a difficult task to reverse-learn. Free-flying honeybees (N = 32) were trained to learn a fine colour discrimination task that could be resolved at ca. 70% accuracy following extended differential conditioning, and were then tested for their ability to reverse-learn this visual problem multiple times. Subsequent analyses identified three different strategies: ‘Deliberative-decisive’ bees that could, after sev…