Indoor tent management for extending honey bee research season: benefits and caveats.

Honey bees are important organisms for research in many fields, including physiology, behavior, and ecology. Honey bee colonies are relatively easy and affordable to procure, manage, and replace. However, some difficulties still exist in honey bee research, specifically that honey bee colonies have a distinct seasonality, especially in temperate regions.

Novelty detection in early olfactory processing of the honey bee, Apis mellifera.

Animals are constantly bombarded with stimuli, which presents a fundamental problem of sorting among pervasive uninformative stimuli and novel, possibly meaningful stimuli. We evaluated novelty detection behaviorally in honey bees as they position their antennae differentially in an air stream carrying familiar or novel odors. We then characterized neuronal responses to familiar and novel odors in the first synaptic integration center in the brain-the antennal lobes.

Heritable Cognitive Phenotypes Influence Appetitive Learning but not Extinction in Honey Bees.

Learning and attention allow animals to better navigate complex environments. While foraging, honey bees ( L.) learn several aspects of their foraging environment, such as color and odor of flowers, which likely begins to happen before they evaluate the quality of the food.

The Philosophy of Outliers: Reintegrating Rare Events Into Biological Science.

Individual variation in morphology, physiology, and behavior has been a topic of great interest in the biological sciences. While scientists realize the importance of understanding diversity in individual phenotypes, historically the "minority" results (i.e.

Early olfactory, but not gustatory processing, is affected by the selection of heritable cognitive phenotypes in honey bee.

Associative learning enables animals to predict rewards or punishments by their associations with predictive stimuli, while non-associative learning occurs without reinforcement. The latter includes latent inhibition (LI), whereby animals learn to ignore an inconsequential 'familiar' stimulus. Individual honey bees display heritable differences in expression of LI.

Individual learning phenotypes drive collective behavior.

Individual differences in learning can influence how animals respond to and communicate about their environment, which may nonlinearly shape how a social group accomplishes a collective task. There are few empirical examples of how differences in collective dynamics emerge from variation among individuals in cognition. Here, we use a naturally variable and heritable learning behavior called latent inhibition (LI) to show that interactions among individuals that differ in this cognitive ability drive collective foraging behavior in honey bee colonies.

Experimental psychology meets behavioral ecology: what laboratory studies of learning polymorphisms mean for learning under natural conditions, and vice versa.

Behavior genetics, and specifically the study of learning and memory, has benefitted immensely from the development of powerful forward- and reverse-genetic methods for investigating the relationships between genes and behavior. Application of these methods in controlled laboratory settings has led to insights into gene-behavior relationships. In this perspective article, we argue that the field is now poised to make significant inroads into understanding the adaptive value of heritable variation in behavior in natural populations.

A Multiscale Review of Behavioral Variation in Collective Foraging Behavior in Honey Bees.

The emergence of collective behavior from local interactions is a widespread phenomenon in social groups. Previous models of collective behavior have largely overlooked the impact of variation among individuals within the group on collective dynamics. Honey bees provide an excellent model system for exploring the role of individual differences in collective behavior due to their high levels of individual variation and experimental tractability.

Diverse single-stranded DNA viruses associated with honey bees (Apis mellifera).

Honey bees (Apis mellifera) research has increased in light of their progressive global decline over the last decade and the important role they play in pollination. One expanding area of honey bee research is analysis of their microbial community including viruses. Several RNA viruses have been characterized but little is known about DNA viruses associated with bees.

Individual differences in learning and biogenic amine levels influence the behavioural division between foraging honeybee scouts and recruits.

Animals must effectively balance the time they spend exploring the environment for new resources and exploiting them. One way that social animals accomplish this balance is by allocating these two tasks to different individuals. In honeybees, foraging is divided between scouts, which tend to explore the landscape for novel resources, and recruits, which tend to exploit these resources.

Octopamine and tyramine modulate the thermoregulatory fanning response in honey bees ().

Biogenic amines regulate the proximate mechanisms underlying most behavior, including those that contribute to the overall success of complex societies. For honey bees, one crucial set of behaviors contributing to the welfare of a colony is involved with nest thermoregulation. Worker honeybees cool the colony by performing a fanning behavior, the expression of which is largely influenced by response thresholds modulated by the social environment.