Figure 3: Patterns of reward specialization and of foraging effort for bees with a given degree of specialization, over both short and long timescales.

Percentage of foragers with a given (a) lifetime or (b) mean daily nectar foraging preference (+SE). Percentage of (c) colony lifetime or (d) mean daily foraging bouts made by foragers with a given (c) lifetime or (d) mean daily nectar foraging preference (+SE). Bin width = 10%; range = 0.0–100.0% nectar foraging preference; N = 97 bees and 43 days. (e) A 2-week foraging period for exemplars of the three major types of reward specialists: a bee that specialized on nectar collection over its lifetime (top trace - blue line); a bee that specialized on pollen collection over its lifetime (bottom trace - yellow line); and a bee that specialized on either food type over the short-term (middle trace - black line). (f) Jacob’s Constancy Index (CI) for forager lifetime: bees that were more inconstant (systematically alternated between rewards) have values closer to −1; bees that made random transitions between rewards have values closer to 0; bees that foraged in runs for one or the other reward have values closer to 1; bin width = 0.1; N = 68 bees. (g) Variance of percentage daily reward specialization; bin width = 10; N = 97 bees.