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)