Spontaneous quantity discrimination of artificial flowers by foraging honeybees

Many animals need to process numerical information in order to survive. Spontaneous quantity discrimination is useful for assessing food resources, aggressive interactions, predator avoidance, and prey choice. Spontaneous quantity discrimination is a numerical ability allowing differentiation between two or more quantities without reinforcement nor prior training on any numerical task. Honeybees have previously demonstrated the ability to learn to count landmarks, match quantities, use numerical rules, discriminate between quantities, and perform arithmetic, but have not been tested for spontaneous quantity discrimination. In bees, spontaneous quantity discrimination could be useful when assessing the quantity of flowers available in a patch and thus maximizing foraging efficiency. In the current study, we assessed the spontaneous quantity discrimination behaviour of honeybees. Bees were trained to associate a single yellow artificial flower with sucrose. Bees were then tested for their...