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. 2017 May 16;7:1951. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-01980-1

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© The Author(s) 2017

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Nicotine previously encountered in nectar prompts bumblebees to make suboptimal choices in terms of reward. Reversal learning curve (mean choice accuracy ± SEM). After the forward learning phase, each bee underwent an individual reversal learning procedure in which the rewarding and unrewarding flower colours were switched and the rewarding flower for all groups provided sucrose solution (without nicotine). For each bee (n = 60) 70 consecutive visits were recorded. Learning curve for each group was generated from the mean choice accuracies (percentage correct choices made) for every consecutive block of 10 choices. Overall nicotine at 50-ppm strongly reduced the speed of learning (P < 0.001). A poorer performance than controls, yet not statistically significant, was also observed in bees previously exposed to the other two tested doses (1-ppm: P = 0.15, 2.5-ppm: P = 0.31).