The effect of individual learning on collective foraging in honey bees in complex environments

The trade-off between exploiting known resources and exploring for new ones is a complex decision-making challenge, particularly when resource patches are variable in quality and heterogeneously distributed in the landscape. Social insect colonies navigate this challenge, in the absence of centralized control, by allocating different individuals to each of these tasks based on variation in individual behavior. To investigate how heritable differences in individual learning affect a colony’s collective ability to locate and choose among different quality food resources, we develop an agent based model and test its predictions using two genetic lines of honey bees, selected for differences in their learning behavior. Here we show that, paradoxically, colonies containing individuals that are better at learning to ignore unrewarding stimuli are worse at choosing the highest quality resource at the collective level. This work highlights the importance of individual variation within groups on the emergence of collective behavior.