‘Personality’ in bumblebees: individual consistency in responses to novel colours?

It is now recognized that many vertebrates and a few invertebrates show individual-specific consistency in their behaviour across time and context, sometimes in ways that can be paralleled with human personality. Our work aimed at assessing behavioural consistency in a social insect: the bumblebee Bombus terrestris. We focused on a behavioural dimension commonly used in personality studies: the response of an individual to novelty (neophilia/neophobia spectrum). We used a foraging paradigm to quantify individual bees’ response to novel flower colours and to assess the repeatability of this response over time. As for vertebrates, most individual bumblebees responded to a novel stimulus by increasing the time they spent investigating it compared to known stimuli. Using a new statistical approach, the consistency model, we found that individual bees tended to be consistent in their response to novelty over a few hours but were not consistent in their behaviour over 3 days. We conclude that for the neophilia/neophobia paradigm used here, bumblebee foragers do not fulfil the criteria for animal personality in the common sense of the term. Instead their behavioural response to novelty appears to be plastic, varying on a day to day basis.