[ororroro]

The bee results are suss. Bees use pheromones to mark things so there may be no socially learned behavior beyond seeking food at a marked source which is built in. There's also the small sample size which the article mentions. It is still cool that they learned the blue/red trick in the first place either way.

[kombookcha]

Oh, it's for sure not a done deal. But IIRC bees are known to have at least some capacity for memory, in terms of seeking out known food sources that go beyond just following a pheromone marker. I don't know if the mechanism behind this is well understood, but going by the blue/red trick it seems like they can to some extent 'learn' to recognize various types of flowers and seek them out by memory. Whether this type of information is transferable between bees in ways /other/ than a pheromone marker that guides other bees to the same immediate sensory experience of "blue flower = good nectar source", I don't know. But it's intriguing!

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24955780

Also worth noting that bees can transfer navigational information to eachother by 'waggle dancing', so they have multiple possible vectors for information sharing going for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance