What are the basic elements of culture?
Bumblebees can learn from each other
Culture, in its most basic form, is the spread of a certain behaviour within a social group. Which skills are necessary to accomplish this seemingly complex task. Alem and colleagues showed that culture is possible already in social insects lacking the capacity to really understand what they are doing. They demonstrated this capacity by teaching individual bumblebees a certain behaviour (pulling strings to reach a certain reward). Subsequently they showed that individual bees could learn this behaviour by watching and that the behaviour spread within an entire colony.
