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Bumble bees (Bombus spp.) exploiting patchy landscapes make strategic decisions to maximize energetic rewards. Previous evidence suggests that bumble bees use the presence of conspecifics as a cue for finding rewarding floral resources. However, co-foraging bumble bees also risk visiting depleted flowers. This suggests a trade-off between the benefits of exclusive resources and social information. Bumble bee foragers may shift from prioritizing social information to exclusive resources as they change from being naive to experienced. Here, I assess the frequency of co-foraging in flower patches for wild bumble bees in a natural subalpine meadow to determine whether foragers are prioritizing exclusive resources or social information and whether this changes as they gain experience throughout their lifetimes. I found that bees are not more or less likely to recruit to a patch with a co-forager than expected with random selection. However, bees stay longer at patches with co-foragers than without, even when controlling for flower density. Experience across days had no effect on the influence of co-forager presence on these indices of patch selection. These findings can inform our understanding of bumble bee foraging strategies and how their use of cues varies at differing scales and stages of floral resource selection.
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