Bees are flexible and adaptive learners, capable of learning stimuli seen on arrival and at departure from flowers where they have fed. This gives bees the potential to learn all information associated with a feeding event, but it also presents the challenge of managing information that is irrelevant, inconsistent, or conflicting. Here, we examined how presenting bumblebees with conflicting visual information before and after feeding influenced their learning rate and what they learned.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImproving energy efficiency in the building sector is a subject of significant interest, considering the environmental impact of buildings. Energy efficiency involves many aspects, such as occupant comfort, system monitoring and maintenance, data treatment, instrumentation… Physical modeling and calibration, or artificial intelligence, are often employed to explore these different subjects and, thus, to limit energy consumption in buildings. Even though these techniques are well-suited, they have one thing in common, i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHerein, we report the design, the synthesis, and the study of novel triphenyl phosphonium-based nucleoside conjugates. 2'-Deoxycytidine was chosen as nucleosidic cargo, as it allows the introduction of fluorescein on the exocyclic amine of the nucleobase and grafting of the vector was envisaged through the formation of a biolabile ester bond with the hydroxyl function at the 5'-position. Compound was identified as a potential nucleoside prodrug, showing ability to be internalized efficiently into cells and to be co-localized with mitochondria.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe impact of global warming on wild bee decline threatens the pollination services they provide. Exposure to temperatures above optimal during development is known to reduce adult body size but how it affects the development and scaling of body parts remains unclear. In bees, a reduction in body size and/or a reduction in body parts, such as the antennae, tongue and wings, and how they scale with body size (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSimple feature detectors in the visual system, such as edge-detectors, are likely to underlie even the most complex visual processing, so understanding the limits of these systems is crucial for a fuller understanding of visual processing. We investigated the ability of bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) to discriminate between differently angled edges. In a multiple-choice, "meadow-like" scenario, bumblebees successfully discriminated between angled bars with 7° differences, significantly exceeding the previously reported performance of eastern honeybees (Apis cerana, limit: 15°).
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