Neuroanatomical Basis of Endocrine-Mediated Behavioral Development in the Honey Bee

蜜蜂协会是按工龄组织起来的。最年轻的蜜蜂在蜂箱内工作；年长的蜜蜂成为觅食者。寻找食物和水需要了解蜂巢的位置，使用天空的提示导航到远离蜂巢的地方，以及了解分散资源的位置。Fahrbach博士和Robinson博士实验室过去的研究表明，觅食者体内的保幼激素水平很高，并显示出作为学习中心的大脑区域(蘑菇体)的选择性生长。他们还证明，那些在移除产生保幼激素的腺体后返回蜂群的蜜蜂，在成为觅食者的过程中被推迟了。这些蜜蜂还有另一个惊人的行为缺陷--许多蜜蜂在短途飞行后没有返回蜂箱，速度是对照组的两倍。由于这些丢失发生在开始觅食之前，当蜜蜂进行定向飞行来了解蜂巢位置时，这些研究人员假设荷尔蒙的缺乏会影响视觉学习。这个项目将通过检查它们在几个视觉学习任务中的表现来探索为什么迷路的蜜蜂没有回到它们的蜂巢。他们还将使用谐波雷达技术跟踪蜜蜂的飞行，以了解其蜂巢的位置。这些研究首次使用群居昆虫模型来研究荷尔蒙对学习的影响。

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.