Experience-dependent tuning of early olfactory processing in the adult honey bee, Apis mellifera.

JERNIGAN CHRISTOPHER; HALBY RACHEL; GERKIN RICHARD; SINAKEVITCH, I; LOCATELLI FERNANDO; SMITH BRIAN

JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY

COMPANY OF BIOLOGISTS LTD

Lugar: Cambridge; Año: 2020 vol. 223 p. 1 - 13

0022-0949

Experience-dependentplasticity in the central nervous system allows an animal to adapt its responsesto stimuli over different time scales. In this study we explored the impacts ofadult foraging experience on early olfactory processing by comparing naturallyforaging honey bees, Apis mellifera, tothose that experienced a chronic reduction in adult foraging experience. Weplaced age-matched sets of full-sister honey bees into two different olfactoryconditions, in which animals were allowed to forage ad libitum. In one condition, we restricted the foraging experienceof bees by placing them in a tent in which both sucrose and pollen resourceswere associated with a single odor. In the second condition, bees were allowedto forage freely and therefore receive a diversity of naturally occurring resource-associatedolfactory experiences. We found that honey bees with restricted foraging experienceshad altered antennal lobe development. We measured the glomerular responses toodors using calcium imaging in the antennal lobe, and found that naturalolfactory experience also enhanced the inter-individual variation in glomerularresponse profiles to odors. Additionally, we found that honey bees with adult restrictedforaging experience did not distinguish relevant components of an odor mixturein a behavioral assay as would their freely foraging siblings. This study highlightsthe impacts of individual experience on early olfactory processing at multiplelevels