Imagine handing a cell phone to a person who’d never seen one before and had no knowledge of writing—and asking them to send a text message. Without the necessary background knowledge, the task would be impossible, no matter how smart the person was. “There’s just no way they could do it unless someone showed them how,” says Alice Bridges. She’s a cognitive scientist, a researcher who studies thinking and learning, at the University of Sheffield. Her example shows why social learning is so important. It allows people to gain knowledge and skills too complex for an individual to figure out on their own.
Bridges and her team wanted to find out whether bumblebees could also learn this way. First, Bridges had to design a suitable task to test the animals. It needed to be simple enough for a bee to learn by watching—but complicated enough that it was unlikely any bee could figure out the task by itself. The scientists designed a puzzle box containing tasty sugar water. They wanted to see if bees could work out how to open it to get the reward inside. The box had two doors that bees had to push out of the way. The first door blocked the second. To open the box, a bee had to push both doors in the right order. That allowed it to access the sugary treat (see The Buzz on the Puzzle).
Bridges knew from previous experiments that bees could independently figure out how to push one door for a reward. So the researchers wanted to make sure bees couldn’t figure out the two-step puzzle on their own. The team placed a double-door box in an enclosure with a bumblebee colony for 24 days. Not a single bee solved the puzzle. “It was very stark how difficult this was for them,” says Bridges. Would things be different if a “teacher” showed them what to do?
To find out, the researchers trained a group of demonstrator bees to perform the two-step task. The scientists did this by offering two separate rewards—one for each door. Then they gradually got rid of the reward for the first door. “The bees hated that!” says Bridges. “When they stopped getting that reward, some threw a bit of a tantrum and didn’t want to participate anymore.” But eventually, some of the bees realized they had to push the first door and then the second to get the single reward at the end.
Next the researchers paired the trained bees with ones that had never seen the puzzle box. The scientists allowed the pairs to explore the box together repeatedly so the new bees could see the demonstrators solve it. Finally, the untrained bees got a chance to try the puzzle on their own. About one-third of them succeeded: They’d learned how to solve the challenging puzzle just by watching.