Honeybee learning and memory
Honeybee brain
AL
Moth AL
Honeybee learning and memory
Bees learn and remember A LOT OF STUFF!!
•The location of their hive
•The location of a flower patch
•Which flowers in a patch that yield pollen and nectar based on:
•Color
•Shape
•Odor
•The way back home
•The vector to a food source deciphered from the dance of another bee.
•And much much more!
Bees can communicate what they learn.
Honeybee olfactory learning
Honeybee odor learning facts:
•Learn in as little as a single trial
•Remembers for life
•Latent inhibition/CS-pre-exposure effect
•Can discriminate between odors
•odorants with as little as 1-2 carbon
unit differences
•Varieties of the same species of a
flower based on odor cues (odor
blends)
•Reversal learning (unlearning)
Psychophysics of odor learning:
The relationship between CS and US timing
The CS and US must occur in a specific
temporal relationship:
•CS before US
•CS close to US in time
Honeybee color learning
•Bees fed in the presence of a color
•In test bees placed in a matrix of colors
•Bees congregate around feeding color
Bee color learning
Bees can be trained to respond to any
color within their visual spectra range.
Bees preferentially learn blue-violet colors
better
Stimulus timing and learning
Memory retention as a function of time and number of trials
Memory traces as a function of # of trials
Short term memory decay and
establishment of longer term memory
Pattern learning
Differential conditioning to pattern orientation and symmetry
Rule learning
Two groups of bees were trained.
•One received symmetry
training
•One received asymmetry
training
•Eight successive triads of
stimuli.
Each training stimulus triad was
interspersed with multiple-choice
generalization tests.
•Test (unrewarded) stimuli
consisted of novel
symmetrical or asymmetrical
stimuli.
From the seventh generalization test
onward, bees showed transfer to the
appropriate novel stimulus.
Three different transfer
measures:
•choice frequency
•intensity per choice
•time per choice.
Rule learning in honeybees
Honeybees can learn to navigate a novel
maze based on rule sets:
i.e.
•If yellow-blue then left turn
•If blue-yellow then right turn
•This also demonstrates color learning
Bees can learn to respond to
abstract image with a specific
orientation
Communicating food/nest site location
•Waggle dance: food/nest site is 50m-2mi from hive
•Dance consists of:
•A figure-eight pattern of locomotion
•A cue that the location is not local
•A waggle at the intersection of the eight
•Indicates distance (duration of waggling)
•Direction (angle relative to the sun)
•Size of food source (variance of waggle)
•Quality of nest site overall duration of the dance
Horizontal (outside) waggle points directly to food source
Dance changes with orientation
The position of the sun is represented as top dead center.
Communicating location accuracy
Angular variance of recruits to target
Distance variance of recruits to target