Peripheral taste detection in honey bees: What do taste receptors respond to?

Bestea, Louise; Réjaud, Alexandre; Sandoz, Jean‐Christophe; Carcaud, Julie; Giurfa, Martín; Sanchez, María Gabriela de Brito

doi:10.1111/ejn.15265

Cited by 24 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 215 publications

(413 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Bees were trained during 10 consecutive trials using a differential conditioning procedure ( Figure 1E ) in which one of the rectangles (i.e., one of the two colors, green or blue) was rewarded with 1.5 M sucrose solution (the appetitive conditioned stimulus or CS +) while the other rectangle displaying the alternative color (the aversive conditioned stimulus or CS−) was associated with 3 M NaCl solution. The latter was used to increase the penalty of incorrect choices ( Ayestaran et al, 2010 ; de Brito Sanchez et al, 2015 ; Aguiar et al, 2018 ; Bestea et al, 2021 ). To avoid directional biases, the rewarded and the punished color rectangles were swapped between the left and the right side of the virtual arena in a pseudo random manner along trials.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Neural Signature of Visual Learning Under Restrictive Virtual-Reality Conditions

Lafon

Geng

Avarguès‐Weber

et al. 2022

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Honey bees are reputed for their remarkable visual learning and navigation capabilities. These capacities can be studied in virtual reality (VR) environments, which allow studying performances of tethered animals in stationary flight or walk under full control of the sensory environment. Here, we used a 2D VR setup in which a tethered bee walking stationary under restrictive closed-loop conditions learned to discriminate vertical rectangles differing in color and reinforcing outcome. Closed-loop conditions restricted stimulus control to lateral displacements. Consistently with prior VR analyses, bees learned to discriminate the trained stimuli. Ex vivo analyses on the brains of learners and non-learners showed that successful learning led to a downregulation of three immediate early genes in the main regions of the visual circuit, the optic lobes (OLs) and the calyces of the mushroom bodies (MBs). While Egr1 was downregulated in the OLs, Hr38 and kakusei were coincidently downregulated in the calyces of the MBs. Our work thus reveals that color discrimination learning induced a neural signature distributed along the sequential pathway of color processing that is consistent with an inhibitory trace. This trace may relate to the motor patterns required to solve the discrimination task, which are different from those underlying pathfinding in 3D VR scenarios allowing for navigation and exploratory learning and which lead to IEG upregulation.

show abstract

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Neural Signature of Visual Learning Under Restrictive Virtual-Reality Conditions

Lafon

Geng

Avarguès‐Weber

et al. 2022

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…one of the two colors, green or blue) was rewarded with 1.5 M sucrose solution (the appetitive conditioned stimulus or CS+) while the other cuboid displaying the alternative color (the aversive conditioned stimulus or CS−) was associated with either 60 mM quinine (Experiment 2) 34 or 3 M NaCl solution 35 , 36 (Experiment 3). The latter was used to increase the penalty for incorrect choices 37 .…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Motion cues from the background influence associative color learning of honey bees in a virtual-reality scenario

Lafon

Howard

Paffhausen

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Honey bees exhibit remarkable visual learning capacities, which can be studied using virtual reality (VR) landscapes in laboratory conditions. Existing VR environments for bees are imperfect as they provide either open-loop conditions or 2D displays. Here we achieved a true 3D environment in which walking bees learned to discriminate a rewarded from a punished virtual stimulus based on color differences. We included ventral or frontal background cues, which were also subjected to 3D updating based on the bee movements. We thus studied if and how the presence of such motion cues affected visual discrimination in our VR landscape. Our results showed that the presence of frontal, and to a lesser extent, of ventral background motion cues impaired the bees’ performance. Whenever these cues were suppressed, color discrimination learning became possible. We analyzed the specific contribution of foreground and background cues and discussed the role of attentional interference and differences in stimulus salience in the VR environment to account for these results. Overall, we show how background and target cues may interact at the perceptual level and influence associative learning in bees. In addition, we identify issues that may affect decision-making in VR landscapes, which require specific control by experimenters.

show abstract

“…The hoverfly Eristalis arbustorum can distinguish sucrose with or without 150ppb clothianidin at a distance, potentially due to their spectral difference (Clem et al, 2020). Unlike hoverflies, bees seem to have a non-gustatory preference for neonicotinoid-contaminated sucrose solutions, although the reason behind this preference and the mechanism is not clear (Bestea et al, 2021;de Brito Sanchez et al, 2005;Kessler et al, 2015). Nicotinoids may be spectrally more attractive.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bees differentiate sucrose solution from water at a distance

Kienitz

Czaczkes

Agrò

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

How we treat animals is strongly influenced by our understanding of their cognitive abilities, and thus accurately assessing cognitive abilities has large ethical and policy implications. Bees have become perhaps the most important model group for studying complex cognition in invertebrates, and show a broad variety of impressive cognitive abilities. Most cognition experiments employ a training procedure in which the animal is required to associate a characteristic of a “flower” (neutral stimulus) to a sucrose solution (positive stimulus) over multiple foraging bouts. We hypothesized, however, that sucrose solution may appear different from water to the bee sensorium, especially their visual system, rendering it superfluous for the bee to learn the intended experimental cues. To test this hypothesis, we presented bumblebees simultaneously with 1.6M sucrose and water on artificial flowers, each flower carrying both liquids. The solutions were presented in three different manners, so as to identify the most likely recognition mechanism: 1) in drop form, providing spectral information as well as visible viscosity information; 2) inside cotton-plugged centrifuge tube, to reduce visual information and remove viscosity information; and 3) soaked on raised cigarette filters, to enhance visibility while removing the viscosity information. The bumblebees chose to contact the sucrose solution significantly more often in all three condition, confirming their ability to discriminate sucrose from water at a distance without the use of any other cues. Spectral differences between sucrose and water are the most likely mechanism for this differentiation. These results may have large implication for the design of training procedures, as the presence of an alternative, natural cue may mask the learning of challenging tasks and increase false negative rates. Importantly, the realization that bees can distinguish sucrose from water at a distance may force us to re-examine much of the literature and unpublished ‘negative results’ on bee cognition and learning, weakening some claims, but strengthening others.

show abstract

Peripheral taste detection in honey bees: What do taste receptors respond to?

Cited by 24 publications

References 215 publications

The Neural Signature of Visual Learning Under Restrictive Virtual-Reality Conditions

The Neural Signature of Visual Learning Under Restrictive Virtual-Reality Conditions

Motion cues from the background influence associative color learning of honey bees in a virtual-reality scenario

Bees differentiate sucrose solution from water at a distance

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About