Does swarming cause honey bees to update their solar ephemerides?

Area of Science:

• Animal behavior
• Neuroscience
• Insect cognition

Background:

• Social insects like honey bees exhibit specialized learning for complex tasks like spatial orientation.
• Honey bee navigation relies on a solar ephemeris function, a memory of the sun's daily movement relative to landscape cues.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether honey bees can update their learned solar ephemeris function when transplanted to a new environment with a different landscape.
• To determine if the swarming process, a natural bee transplantation event, facilitates re-learning of the solar ephemeris function.

Main Methods:

• Honey bees were passively transplanted to a new site and their ability to re-learn the solar ephemeris function with a new treeline reference was tested.
• A subset of bees underwent a swarming process before transplantation to assess if this natural behavior influences re-learning.
• Bee orientation was assessed on overcast days, relying on their internal solar ephemeris function.

Main Results:

• Passively transplanted bees failed to update their solar ephemeris function to the new landscape, continuing to use the natal site's orientation cues.
• Even after extensive learning flights post-swarming and transplantation, most bees did not re-learn the solar ephemeris function for the new environment.

Conclusions:

• The honey bee's representation of the solar ephemeris function appears to be encapsulated and inextricably linked to the specific reference landscape where it was initially learned.
• This cognitive encapsulation may explain the bees' failure to adapt their navigation to novel environments, highlighting constraints in their spatial learning mechanisms.