Question: What would you do if you saw a pollinator behaving strangely?

John Paterson answered on 13 Jun 2019:

I would ask myself what the pollinator might be trying to do. A lot of animal behaviour is to do with one of three things – finding food, finding a mate or finding a place to lay eggs. So first of all I would think whether the behaviour makes sense for any of those reasons. If it doesn’t I would think about what else could be affecting it – is there something about the weather, does it have a parasite attached to it?

I would also probably record the behaviour by filming it, taking a photo or writing a note about it. I would then ask one of my colleagues who works with that pollinator whether they’d seen the behaviour before. Then we could decide whether it was a behaviour worth studying further.