Honeybee social learning: knowledge and applications.

WALTER M FARINA; ANDRÉS ARENAS; PAULA C DÍAZ; MARÍA SOL BALBUENA

Montevideo

Encuentro; III Jornadas Uruguayas de Comportamiento Animal; 2011

Universidad Nacional de la Republica

Honeybees use signal and cues to coordinate collective activities. The best known signal is the waggle dance by which dancers provide nest-mates with information about the location of a foraging or nest site. The efficiency of this recruitment strategy partly depends on olfactory information about floral patches that is transferred from dancer to receivers in parallel to spatial information. However, olfactory experiences take place not only in the dance surrounding, but also far from the information center of the hive in which even the youngest bees participate. This is particularly important since it is well known that olfactory conditioning during the first days of the adult lifespan odor-rewarded experiences occurred during young adulthood is manifested in an increase of the general odor-induced activity in the honeybee brain, and also by changes in its shape. This plasticity is highly relevant due to the consequences at a social scale: honeybees can early learn floral odors inside the nest and use this information several days later in the field. Then, the role of precocious olfactory learning is an important matter in the honeybee social life showing long lasting implication at the behavioral, neuro- and socio ?biological levels. Based on these evidences that will be presented in this talk and with the aim to approach this issue to application field, we set out to try improving the management of beehives used to crop pollination. With an integrative approach we probe how feasible I is to manipulate colonies to forage selectively in specific crops. Results at the levels of cognition and honeybee ecology suggest a prompt foraging task in some specific crops, a fact that opens the possibility for an improved efficiency in pollination and crop yield by using beehives.