In a laboratory experiment by Ings and Chittka [1], the environmental conditions for the foraging of bumblebees were varied by putting different types of artificial spiders onto a flower carpet. In our work we check for changes in the bumblebee foraging by statistically analyzing the time series of the bumblebee flights recorded in this experiment. We first estimate parameters for some hypothetical velocity distributions by maximising their likelihood and compare their goodness of fit by applying two different information criteria. Using quantile-quantile-plots we then check for deviations between the estimated probability distributions and the data. We detect differences in these distributions for different individual bumblebees. Particularly, we report on whether there are systematic changes of the bumblebee dynamics in different environments by examining the velocity distributions and the velocity autocorrelation functions.

[1] Thomas C. Ings and Lars Chittka. Current Biology, 18(19):1520-15 24 (2008)