Honey bee society is organized by worker age. The youngest bees work inside the hive; older bees become foragers. Foraging for food and water requires learning the location of the hive, navigating far from the hive using celestial cues, and learning the location of scattered resources. Past research in the laboratories of Dr. Fahrbach and Robinson have revealed that foragers have high levels of juvenile hormone and show selective growth of a brain region (the mushroom bodies) that is a learning center. They have also demonstrated that those bees that returned to their colony after removal of the gland that produces juvenile hormone, are delayed in becoming foragers. These bees have another striking behavioral deficit - many fail to return to the hive after leaving for short flights, at a rate double that of controls. Because these losses occur before the start of foraging, when the bees are taking orientation flights to learn the hive location, these investigators hypothesize that the absence of hormones affects visual learning. This project will explore why the lost bees fail to return to their hive by examining their performance on several visual learning tasks. They will also track flights of bees learning the location of their hive, using the technique of harmonic radar. These studies are the first to use a social insect model to study the effects of a hormone on learning.
