To investigate the possible consequences of brood-temperature regulation in honey bee colonies on the quality of behavioral performance of adults, we placed honey bee pupae in incubators and allowed them to develop at temperatures held constant at 32°C, 34.5°C, and 36°C. This temperature range occurs naturally within hives. On emergence, the young adult bees were marked and introduced into foster colonies housed in normal and observation hives and allowed to live out their lives. No obvious difference in within-hive behavior was noted between the temperature-treated bees and the foster-colony bees. However, when the temperature-treated bees became foragers and were trained to visit a feeder 200 m from the hive, they exhibited clear differences in dance performance that could be correlated with the temperatures at which they had been raised: bees raised at 32°C completed only Ϸ20% of the dance circuits when compared with bees of the higher-temperature group. Also, the variance in the duration of the waggle phase is larger in 32°C-raised bees compared with 36°C-raised bees. All other parameters compared across all groups were not significantly different. One-trial learning and memory consolidation in the bees raised at different temperatures was investigated 1 and 10 min after conditioning the proboscis-extension reflex. Bees raised at 36°C performed as expected for bees typically classified as ''good learners,'' whereas bees raised at 32°C and 34.5°C performed significantly less well. We propose that the temperature at which pupae are raised will influence their behavioral performance as adults and may determine the tasks they carry out best inside and outside the hive. C ollective control of brood temperature is an essential aspect of the behavior of honey bees, and air temperatures measured close to the brood combs are, although never constant, always within a range of 33-36°C (1-7). High temperatures outside the hive are compensated by bringing water into the hive and evaporating this by wing fanning (8). Low temperatures inside the hive are compensated by the production of heat through thoracic muscle activity in individual bees, which then is transferred to the brood (9-11). Extended deviations from an optimal temperature window during development are known to result in morphological deficits (2,(12)(13)(14), so, by stabilizing the brood temperature, bees are able to control the influence of this environmental variable on the development of their offspring.Temperature regimes during the development of individual pupae, however, are dynamic and more complex than is implied by a single average air temperature (15). Measurements of the temperature within individual pupal cells, for example, revealed values that ranged from 32.6°C for the coldest pupa to 35.9°C for the warmest pupa. Taken over a 3-h period, the mean temperatures for these pupae were 33.7°C for the coldest and 35.0°C for the warmest pupa, but no pupae raised in the combs experienced a completely constant temperature (M. Kleinhenz, B. Bujok, S. Fu...

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