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

蜜蜂协会是由工人年龄组成的。 最年轻的蜜蜂在蜂巢里工作;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，利用天体线索远离蜂巢航行，并了解分散资源的位置。 Fahrbach和罗宾逊博士实验室过去的研究表明，觅食者有高水平的保幼激素，并显示出大脑区域（蘑菇体）的选择性生长，这是一个学习中心。 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，在成为觅食者方面有所延迟。 这些蜜蜂还有另一个显著的行为缺陷--许多蜜蜂在离开蜂巢进行短途飞行后未能返回蜂巢，其比率是对照组的两倍。 因为这些损失发生在觅食开始之前，当蜜蜂进行定向飞行以了解蜂巢位置时，这些研究人员假设缺乏激素会影响视觉学习。 这个项目将通过检查蜜蜂在几个视觉学习任务中的表现来探索为什么迷路的蜜蜂不能返回蜂巢。 他们还将利用谐波雷达技术跟踪蜜蜂的飞行，了解它们的蜂巢的位置。 这些研究是第一次使用社会昆虫模型来研究激素对学习的影响。

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.