Early olfactory experience within an appetitive context in honeybees

ARENAS, ANDRÉS; FARINA, WALTER M

Ribeirao Preto, Brasil

Congreso; 8th International IBRA International Conference on Tropical Bees; 2004

International Bee Research Association

Honey bee foragers easily adjust their olfactory memories to successive experiences such as changes in the floral availability. This plasticity allows them to shift from one memory to another when the situation calls for it, which is one of the main elements of their adaptability. It would be reasonable to think that pre-foraging olfactory experiences could give place to memory templates that might later be stronger than memories established during the actual foraging activities. These early experiences would bias, in the long term, the foraging bee behavior. We hypothesize  that these pre-foraging experiences could conform long-term olfactory memories if acquired in an appetitive context, where the scent occurs together with a reward that circulates among workers inside the hive. In order to control the olfactory experience of pre foragers, groups of 60-80 individuals where kept in cages inside an incubator from the emergence to beginning of the foraging activities (predetermined in 17 days old). Throughout this period, bees were fed with ad-libitum sucrose solution. At different ages a pure odor was added to the solution during four consecutive days (ages: 1-4, 5-8, 9-12 and 13-16). In day 17 bees were tested to the familiar odor and to a novel one in a proboscis-extension paradigm. Results showed that bees in a foraging age could evoke olfactory memories towards the odor that was presented during pre-foraging stages. In addition, in the learning experiments, they easily acquired and retained the conditioned response. Moreover, not all the ages had the same response towards the odor, the bees that received the odor between days 1 and 8 presented the highest response levels.