Honey
bees have a well organized career path with different duties at different ages.
When young, they sort out the incoming nectar, feed the larvae, keep the place
tidy, and build new comb. Later on, they become foragers and collect water,
nectar and pollen.
They
can be trained to take home sucrose and recruit others to help and scents can
be used to take them to fresh sources. Young, eager foragers are the easiest to
train using scents to indicate sources according to a new paper in the Journal
of Experimental Biology (1).
When
freshly emerged, the young bees have trouble getting their minds on the job and
don’t do so well. The same is true of old foraging hands who have got set in
their ways. For the old girls there isn’t much hope, but for the young ones
science can come to the rescue.
Behrends
and Scheiner showed that by spiking the nectar with octopamine, the young
foragers got right on top of the task in hand. It wasn’t helpful with teaching
an old bee new tricks though.
Octopamine
is a neural hormone that plays a major role in learning and memory for bees and
fruit flies, but clearly only on the young ones. It has other functions as well,
but so far we don’t know how they change with age. For us it has rumored fat
control properties, but doesn’t seem to help with our learning as the addition
in slimming remedies haven’t been shown to be all that efficacious.
- A. Behrends & R. Scheiner, J. Exp. Biol., 215, 1076, (2012)
