Understanding how animals perceive, learn and remember stimuli is critical for understanding both how cognition is shaped by natural selection, and how ecological factors impact behaviour.Unfortunately, the limited number of protocols currently available for studying insect cognition has restricted research to a few commercially available bee species, in almost exclusively laboratory settings.

In a new video Felicity Muth describes a simple method she developed with Trenton Cooper, Rene Bonilla and Anne Leonard for testing both lab- and wild-caught bees for their preferences, learning and memory. They hope this method will be useful for students and researchers who have not worked on cognition in bees before. The video includes a tutorial for carrying out the method and describes the data presented in their Methods in Ecology and Evolution article, also titled ‘A novel protocol for studying bee cognition in the wild‘.