Publications by authors named "Simon Menzel"

As a canary in a coalmine warns of dwindling breathable air, the honeybee can indicate the health of an ecosystem. Honeybees are the most important pollinators of fruit-bearing flowers, and share similar ecological niches with many other pollinators; therefore, the health of a honeybee colony can reflect the conditions of a whole ecosystem. The health of a colony may be mirrored in social signals that bees exchange during their sophisticated body movements such as the waggle dance.

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The search for neural correlates of operant and observational learning requires a combination of two (experimental) conditions that are very difficult to combine: stable recording from high order neurons and free movement of the animal in a rather natural environment. We developed a virtual environment (VE) that simulates a simplified 3D world for honeybees walking stationary on an air-supported spherical treadmill. We show that honeybees perceive the stimuli in the VE as meaningful by transferring learned information from free flight to the virtual world.

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