Data from: Copy-when-uncertain: bumblebees rely on social information when rewards are highly variable

To understand the relative benefits of social and personal information use in foraging decisions, we developed an agent-based model of social learning that predicts social information should be more adaptive where resources are highly variable and personal information where resources vary little. We tested our predictions with bumblebees and found that foragers relied more on social information when resources were variable than when they were not. We then investigated whether socially salient cues are used preferentially over non-social ones in variable environments. Although bees clearly used social cues in highly variable environments, under the same conditions they did not use non-social cues. These results suggest that bumblebees use a 'copy-when-uncertain' strategy.beeLandingsPrimary data from observing bees throughout the test phase (group=test_easy OR test_diff) and last round of the cue training (group=dummy_last). Further columns include: Cue types: bee model (=clay), craft foam (=green); Landed: at which of the 12 flowers did the bee land and in which sequence; Cue: describes which of the 12 flowers had an additional cue attached; reward: which of the 12 flowers were rewarding; firstLanding and lastLanding: time in minutes between a bee entering the arena and first/last landing on a flower.code_figures_statisticsR code to create figures and perform statistical tests that reused for the main text and the supplemental information of the article. It requires the 'beeLandings', 'simulation_results_1', and 'simulation_results_2' file. Depending on where the files are saved to, the path to the files has to be changed in the R code (be default files are assumed to be located at the desktop).simulation_results_1Results from first simulation (RData file, can be opened with R)simulation1simulation_results_2Results from second simulation (RData file, can be opened with R)simulation