Classical conditioning of proboscis extension in the stingless social bee Melipona quadrifasciata.

MC CABE, SOFIA; HARTFELDER, KLAUS; FARINA, WALTER M

Riberao Preto, Brasil

Congreso; VII Encontro sobre abelhas; 2006

In order to obtain food efficiently from flowers, pollinators have to learn the association between reward and several floral cues. Part of the basic information to be learnt is the food odor, which  facilitates the return to a profitable flower patch. Olfactory learning was extensively studied in honeybees using different paradigms. One of them is the proboscis extension response (PER) paradigm which allows the study of bees’ cognitive abilities under controlled conditions. The PER paradigm also enables the quantification of behavioral responses which can be compared within groups of evolutionary-related species that share a same biotope. In this sense, studies that compare learning abilities between native and invasive social bees which coexist could help to understand the bases of the competence for resource amongst them. The goals of this study are to analyze: i) the capability of the native stingless bee Melipona quadrifasciata to be olfactory conditioned in the PER paradigm; ii) its response compared to that obtained with the invasive honeybee Apis mellifera scutellata; iii) the role of previous appetitive experiences within the nest in the learning performance for Melipona. Bees from both species were captured right outside their hives, harnessed, and tested for their PER to the contact of sucrose solution to their antenna. We evaluated responses to different floral odors before and after a five-pair differential conditioning. Results show that: i) Melipona bees have been conditioned to discriminate a rewarded odor from a non-rewarded in a PER paradigm for the first time, ii) although both social bee species show similar sucrose-response threshold, Africanized honeybees presented higher discrimination performance and conditioned response, and iii) appetitive experiences paired with an odor inside the hive improved Melipona bees’ learning abilities. These studies allow the incorporation of Melipona quadrifasciata as a new experimental model for learning and memory studies in insects.