CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The study of nectar foraging in honeybees provides an excellent opportunity to analyze social networks in a complex animal society. A key organizational principle of this control-decentralized system is that most colony members are involved in only a few interactions, while some others are involved in many interactions. Once the nectar spreads within the colony, the middle-aged food processors distributed to the youngest bees the food received from the active foragers. This passage of the liquid food occurs through mouth-to-mouth trophallactic interactions and leads to the establishment of long-term associative memories in the food-recipient bees. The memories of these food odors can be evoked even days after they are formed inside the colony. These evidences open the possibility to study the intersection between cognitive and socio-biological issues. Thus, to understand how chemosensory information is propagated within the nestmates we analyzed associative and non-associative cognitive abilities in captured hive bees belonging to different subcastes or ages. Results show that the propagation of food-odor information amongst the colony mates is different during the resource exploitation: while a rapid propagation of the rewarded odor within the group of foragers and food processors was found in a short-term (within the first 24-hours), the odor information propagation was slower in the group of the youngest bees. After one days to exploiting a particular food source, the same odor information is shared by all of the adult workers, and can be retained several days after the food source is depleted. This opens the possibility that those young hive bees that can establish memories of rewarded odors could use them later on when they reach their foraging age. The putative information networks formed during the nectar circulation would be functional not only when a new resource is discovered, but also when it re-appears within the hives surroundings. Thus, dynamic information networks can form stable and long-term social information about resources within the honeybee hives.