Performance of honeybees in analogues of the rodent radial maze

Abstract

The performance of individual honeybees pretrained to forage at a laboratory window was studied in three rudimentary analogues of the radial maze designed for the study of short-term spatial memory in rats. A linear arrangement of three targets was used in Experiment 1, a triangular arrangement of three targets in Experiment 2, and a rectangular arrangement of four targets in Experiment 3, with reward only for the first response to each of the targets presented on any given trial. Several systematic patterns of responding were observed, with no indication that the choices made by the animals were influenced by memory of targets recently visited.Trace conditioning of both color and odor has been found in honeybees (Menzel, 1968;Menzel & Bitterman, 1983), but discriminative control oftheir behavior by transient residual effects of prior stimuli, commonly referred to as control by "short-term memory" or "working memory," has yet to be demonstrated convincingly. In a recent experiment, Greggers and Menzel (1993) trained foragers with four feeders that yielded sucrose solution at different rates offlow. The authors were unable to model the choices of their animals on the simple assumption that the associative strength of each feeder approached an asymptotic value determined by the flow-rate, but found it useful to think in terms of two "memories," one "feeder specific" and the other "feeder independent"-the associative strength of the entire "patch." The patch memory was characterized as "short-term working memory" and the feeder-specific memory as "long-term reference memory"-a distinction difficult to understand, given that both memories were assumed to be "updated" by reward according to equations of the same form and independently of time. Exactly the opposite usage would have been no less meaningful. Control of performance by short-term memory in the conventional sense was reported more recently by Brown and Demas (1994), who used an analogue ofthe radial maze designed for rats (Olton & Samuelson, 1976). Confronted on each trial with an array ofsix baited targets, honeybees showed a significantly greater-thanchance tendency to avoid targets chosen earlier on the trial, but the effect was smaIl and the method (for reasons subThis research was supported by Grant IBN-9308132 from the National Science Foundation. The participation ofS.S. was made possible by a grant from the New College Foundation. We are grateful to Lisa Travillion for pilot data, and to Michael F. Brown both for a preprint of his paper with Demas (Brown & Demas, 1994) and for information about their work that is not given in the paper. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to M. E. Bitterman, Bekesy Laboratory of Neurobiology, 1993 East-West Road, Honolulu, HI 96822 (e-mail: jeftb@ahi.pbrc.hawaii.edu).-r-Accepted by previous editor; Vincent M. LoLordo sequently to be considered) highly unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, the line of investigation begun by Brown and Demas is worth pursuing further.The key to the impressive performanc...

Comparative analysis of learning in honeybees

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Effect of acute pesticide exposure on bee spatial working memory using an analogue of the radial-arm maze

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Comparative study of environmental factors influencing motor task learning and memory retention in sighted and blind crayfish

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