Ecological drivers of bee cognition: insights from stingless bees

Stingless bees (Apidae, Meliponini) are a group of highly eusocial bees with pantropic distribution. The variety of life styles among the approximately 600 species and their frequent specialization on a specific habitat type render them a promising group to study how environmental pressures shaped specific traits during evolution. The present review aimed at identifying potential ecological drivers of bee cognition. Some interesting trends emerged from the scarce literature existing on this topic. A species’ investment in particular neural substrates (sensory periphery, centers of information processing and integration) is associated with its foraging and anti-predator strategies. Innate preferences are tuned to often very specific needs, including defense against nest robbers, obligatory cleptobiosis, or foraging under dim-light conditions. These sensory biases, however, can be molded through experience and learning. In addition to associations between particular features of a food source and its quality, bees evaluate feeding sites based on previous experience with signals and cues that indicate potential competition. Moreover, inexperienced foragers learn specific characteristics of an exploited resource, like its scent or profitability, through recruitment signals produced by active food collectors. However, the cognitive abilities of bees, which are key to efficient food collection, are threatened by anthropogenic stressors. Sublethal doses of agrochemicals, in particular, have been shown to provoke cell death of higher brain centers, therewith reducing learning skills of the exposed individuals. Important questions for future studies are whether and to what extent different levels of cognitive plasticity found among stingless bees may attenuate the impact of human stressors.