A paper recently out from Lars Chittka's group explored bumble bees learning to pull a string to expose a sugar reward in an artificial flower hidden under a plexiglass screen. A small proportion of workers work it out then 60% of 25 naive bees that were allowed to watch also picked up the skill. The skill propagates through the colony even in the absence of the original genius bee. Cool, huh?!



Alem S., Perry C.J., Zhu X., Loukola O.J., Ingraham T., Søvik E. & Chittka L. (2016) Associative Mechanisms Allow for Social Learning and Cultural Transmission of String Pulling in an Insect. PLoS Biology 14(10): e1002564. doi:10.1371/journal. pbio.1002564.