For Our Beekeepers

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They're smart too!

Bumblebees are nimble learners.

Perry and his colleagues wrote Thursday in the journal Science that, despite bees' miniature brains, they can solve new problems quickly just by observing a demonstration. This suggests that bees, which are important crop pollinators, could in time adapt to new food sources if their environment changed.

As we have reported on The Salt before, bee populations around the world have declined in recent years. Scientists think a changing environment is at least partly responsible.

Perry and colleagues built a platform with a porous ball sitting at the center of it. If a bee went up to the ball, it would find that it could access a reward, sugar water.

One by one, bumblebees walked onto the platform, explored a bit, and then slurped up the sugar water in the middle.

"Essentially, the first experiment was: Can bees learn to roll a ball?" says Perry.

Then, the researchers moved the ball to the edge of the platform.

"The bees came out, looked at the center, didn't have reward. They went to the ball, didn't have reward. They had to figure out that they needed to move the ball from the edge to the center, and then they'd get reward," says Perry.

The ball was a token, like the dollar bill you'd put in a vending machine. The sugar water was like a can of soda that could only be unlocked using the token.

If a bee couldn't figure out how to get the reward, a researcher would demonstrate using a puppet — a plastic bee on the end of a stick — to scoot the ball from the edge of the platform to the center.

"Bees that saw this demonstration learned very quickly how to solve the task. They started rolling the ball into the center; they got better over time," says Perry.

They learned from watching a puppet bee. Daaaang.

And some busybee-scientists are probing the bee brains.

The difficulty to simultaneously record neural activity and behavior presents a considerable limitation for studying mechanisms of insect learning and memory. The challenge is finding a model suitable for the use of behavioral paradigms under the restrained conditions necessary for neural recording. In honeybees, Pavlovian conditioning relying on the proboscis extension reflex (PER) has been used with great success to study different aspects of insect cognition. However, it is desirable to combine the advantages of the PER with a more robust model that allows simultaneous electrical or optical recording of neural activity. Here, we briefly discuss the potential use of bumblebees as models for the study of learning and memory under restrained conditions. We base our arguments on the well-known cognitive abilities of bumblebees, their social organization and phylogenetic proximity to honeybees, our recent success using Pavlovian conditioning to study learning in two bumblebee species, and on the recently demonstrated robustness of bumblebees under conditions suitable for electrophysiological recording.