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Trapping success was calculated for traplines set on 3 consecutive nights (no. trapped rodents ÷ no. of traps set per night × no. of nights) and was 9.2% (635/6895) for all locations; 23% indoors and 4.8% outdoors.
To test whether bees rely on nearest-neighbour movements, we investigated the travel optimization performance of traplining bumble-bees faced with a multi-location routing problem in a flight cage.
As a youth, my father had found himself happier following a trapline than helping on the farm or going to high school — and richer, too, than he had ever been before — and this idea had come upon him and he had taken it up, as he thought, for a lifetime.
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"This is Xeni Gwet'in's trapline and inside one of Canada's only Court Declarations of Aboriginal rights".
During the last 20 bouts, all bees used one of the shortest possible routes as a trapline (the route they used most often: 25·19 ± 4·19% of the foraging bouts, n=15), by moving either clockwise (four bees) or anticlockwise (11 bees) between flowers.
All five bees used one of these longer routes as their phase 2 trapline (used in 24 ± 4% of the foraging bouts, n=5), thus maximizing initial rate of reward intake rather than minimizing distance travelled (Fig. 5).
- More recently, laboratory studies on bees have begun to investigate the behavioral mechanisms underpinning trapline foraging by recording the movements of individually marked foragers exploiting remote controlled artificial flowers, fitted with automated tracking systems, in indoor flight cages.
We also found evidence that orchid bees may trapline floral resources, as previously thought, because individual bees visited specific sites on successive days.
