Past experience with spatial or temporal resource unpredictability shapes exploration in honey bees, Apis mellifera

Foraging animals must repeatedly decide whether to exploit current resources or explore to gain information and locate new resources. Balancing these two often mutually exclusive options is made more difficult by environmental changes that can occur predictably, as seen in daily patterns of nectar secretion in flowers, or unpredictably, as seen when resources are depleted by competitors. Recent experiences with predictable and unpredictable rewards potentially provide information that foraging animals can use to decide when it is beneficial to explore versus exploit. However, it is unclear how the predictability of recent experiences can shape an animal's future exploration after rewards vanish and they have no option but to search. We tested how experience with unpredictability related to two types of environmental change, unpredictability in reward location and unpredictability in daily timing of rewards, shaped the exploratory behaviour of honey bees in the absence of a reward. We found that honey bees that experienced unpredictable rewards in space or time were less precise in their exploration after those rewards vanished. In spatial experiments, bees searched more broadly within a patch if they had experience with unpredictably located rewards and spent more time searching outside the patch than bees that experienced predictably located rewards. In temporal experiments, bees that experienced unpredictably timed rewards distributed their search effort more broadly outside of the time they last received a high-quality reward; also, bees that experienced any change in reward searched more intensively regardless of how predictable the reward had been. In contrast to the differences in search precision, a bee's previous experience with spatial or temporal unpredictability of rewards did not change how persistently she searched for a reward. This study provides novel insights into how predictability of previous experiences can shape exploratory behaviour even in the absence of rewards.