Learned foraging preferences after experiencing adulterated pollen in honeybee colonies

ROCÍO LAJAD; ANDRÉS ARENAS

Juiz de Fora, Mina Gerais

Congreso; XXXVIII Encontro Anual de Etologia (EAE) y III Reunião de Biologia do Comportamento do Cone Sul (RBC); 2021

SBEt-Sociedade Brasileira de Etologia

The mechanism by which honeybees Apis mellifera select pollen is little understood. Pollen, themain protein resource of bee colonies, may vary in its composition according to the floral origin.Worker bees of different ages use pollen in various ways. Fresh pollen is not ingested byforagers at the source and it has been suggested that they are not able to make foragingdecisions based on pollen composition. We hypothesize that pollen assessment occurs afterpollen is processed inside the nest, likely mediated by young bees that consume the resource.To unveil the mechanisms by which foragers avoid less suitable pollens, we performed dualchoice experiments with colonies confined in flying cages (9x3x2m). We compared foragers´preferences for two monofloral-pollen sources after one of them was adulterated with adeterrent (amygdalin). The adulterated pollen was offered either: i) to foragers at the pollensource; ii) to all the bees inside the hive; or iii) to young bees transiently isolated from thecolony during treatment. We included controls where pollen was offered unadulterated.Differences in pollen preferences among treated and control groups were analyzed by meansof linear regression with normal distribution in the R environment. Interestingly, our resultsindicate that: (i) when the adulterated pollen was experienced directly at the food source,foragers could not avoid it (P >0.05); (ii) foragers did avoid the pollen that had beenexperienced as adulterated inside the hive compared with the control (P 0.05).Altogether, results suggest that assessment of pollen composition requires the resource to beexperienced inside the hive for honeybee foragers to adjust their preferences to the mostsuitable pollens.