Bees are excellent foragers and decisionmakers. Image credit: HaDi MaBouDi (CC BY 4.0)
In the natural world, decision-making processes are often intricate and challenging. Animals frequently encounter situations where they have limited information on which to rely to guide them, yet even simple choices can have far-reaching impact on survival.
Each time a bee sets out to collect nectar, for example, it must use tiny variations in colour or odour to decide which flower it should land on and explore. Each ‘mistake’ is costly, wasting energy and exposing the insect to potential dangers. To learn how to refine their choices through trial-and-error, bees only have at their disposal a brain the size of a sesame seed, which contains fewer than a million neurons. And yet, they excel at this task, being both quick and accurate. The underlying mechanisms which drive these remarkable decision-making capabilities remain unclear.
In response, MaBouDi et al. aimed to explore which strategies honeybees adopt to forage so effectively, and the neural systems that may underlie them. To do so, they released the insects in a ‘field’ containing artificial flowers in five different colours. The bees were trained to link each colour with a certain likelihood of receiving either a sugary liquid (reward) or bitter quinine (punishment); they were then tested on this knowledge.
Next, MaBouDi et al. recorded how the bees would navigate a ‘reduced evidence’ test, where the colour of the flowers were ambiguous and consisted in various blends of the originally rewarded or punished colours; and a ‘reduced reward likelihood’ test, where the sweet recompense was offered less often than before.
Response times and accuracy rates revealed a complex pattern of decision-making processes. How quickly the insects made a choice, and the types of mistakes they made (such as deciding to explore a non-rewarded flower, or to ignore a rewarded one) were dependent on both the quality of the evidence and the certainty of the reward. Such sophistication and subtlety in decision-making is comparable to that of primates.
Next, MaBouDi et al. developed a computational model which could faithfully replicate the pattern of decisions exhibited by the bees, while also being plausible biologically. This approach offered insights into how a small brain could execute such complex choices ‘on the fly’, and the type of neural circuits that would be required. Going forward, this knowledge could be harnessed to design more efficient decision-making algorithms for artificial systems, and in particular for autonomous robotics.
