Dissertation Research: The Development of Spatial Memory in Honeybees

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Dyer, Fred IBN-9423576 Non Technical Summary Many animals, ranging from insects to human beings, face the problem of using features of a landscape to find places to feed or nest, and spatial orientation has been studied intensively by generations of biologists and psychologists. Honey bees have long been an important model organism for studies of how visual features of the environment can be used for orientation. Worker bees move over an enormous space, traveling up to 10 km from the nest in search of food, using landmarks and celestial cues to find their way. Furthermore, they do this with a very small brain. Thus they present an extreme version of a problem that arises on some level for all animals: given that there are limits to the capacity of a nervous system to store and process information,, how can the brain be designed to produce appropriate behavior in a complex environment? Previous work on how bees use features of the landscape for orientation has focused of the specific features of the landscape that bees learn about. In this project, the complementary issue of how the bees' spatial memory develops is addressed. The research will examine what bees learn as a consequence of their first short (less than 10 minutes) orientation flight in a new landscape. By studying the homing ability of bees that have been displaced from the hive following their first orientation flights, the experiments will address questions about how widely and uniformly bees learn about a landscape around the nest, whether the landscape to be learned influences the extent of the bees' exploration of the landscape, and what role the sun plays in learning landmarks during the orientation flight. This work should pave the way for studies of the neural mechanisms of spatial learning in bees and other insects. Also, to the extent that other animals face navigational problems parallel to those faced by honey bees, these studies may contribute to the d evelopment of general theories about how spatial memory is generated.