Assessment of appetitive behavior in honeybee dance followers

MOAURO, M; BALBUENA, M SOL; FARINA WALTER M.

frontiers in behavioral neuroscience

Frontiers

Lugar: Basilea; Año: 2018 vol. 12

1662-5153

Honey bees transfer different informational components of the discovered feedingsource to their nestmates during the waggle dance. To decode the multicomponentinformation of this complex behavior, dance followers have to attend to the mostrelevant signal elements while filtering out less relevant ones. To achieve that, dancefollowers should present improved abilities to acquire information compared with thosebees not engaged in this behavior. Through proboscis extension response assays,sensory and cognitive abilities were tested in follower and non-follower bees. Individualswere captured within the hive, immediately after following waggle runs or a bit furtherfrom the dancer. Both behavioral categories present low and similar spontaneous odorresponses (SORs). However, followers exhibit differences in responsiveness to sucroseand odor discrimination: followers showed increased gustatory responsiveness and,after olfactory differential conditioning, better memory retention than non-followers.Thus, the abilities of the dance followers related to appetitive behavior would allow themto improve the acquisition of the dance surrounding information.