Like all foragers, nectarivorous social insects are faced with the dilemma of how to divide their time between continuing to exploit a previously experienced food source of known value, and exploring the environment to discover alternative food sources.  This decision is presumably affected by the payoffs associated with alternative options, but these payoffs may in turn be shaped by biological characteristics such as body size, colony size, and the mode of recruitment to food.  To explore these issues we compared the foraging decisions of honeybees (Apis mellifera) and bumblebees (Bombus impatiens) which differ in a host of individual and colonial traits.  Specifically, we studied how bees shifted among foraging locations as the availability of rewards changed over time.  In this experiment individual foragers were given constant access to a low reward feeder and then, after an extended period of foraging, introduced to a novel high-reward feeder where they were allowed to accumulate either a low or high level of foraging experience.  After this period of foraging, the high-reward feeder ceased to be rewarding (i.e. the sucrose solution was replaced with water), while the low-reward feeder remained available.  During this testing phase we monitored both feeders for sampling behavior.  Our results showed that at low levels of experience bumblebees are much quicker to resign from a formerly rewarding food source than honeybees, while at both levels of experience bumblebees are much more apt to reinitiate sampling from the low-reward feeder.  These results suggest that interspecific differences between foraging bees strongly influence the decision to re-exploit a low quality food source or to continue searching for a higher quality alternative.