Taste perception in honeybees: just a taste of honey?

Abstract

The advent of the genomic era has opened new doors to understand the fundamental organization of living organisms and has therefore promoted a fertile field of comparative research that intends to identify similarities and differences between related and unrelated species at the genomic level. One of the organisms whose genome has been recently decoded is that of the honeybee Apis mellifera, enabling a direct comparison with another wellstudied insect, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. It was reported that the honeybee has only ten gustatory receptors and thus a very poor taste perception compared to Drosophila, which presents 68 gustatory receptors, and the mosquito Anopheles gambiae, which presents 76 gustatory receptors. In this forum article, we discuss the implications of these findings taking into account previous and new discoveries on honeybee gustation based on behavioral and neurobiological studies by several authors and us. We conclude that the world of taste of a honeybee might not be as poor as proposed and that further studies should integrate molecular, neurobiological, behavioral and ecological approaches to better characterize taste perception in bees.

Differential conditioning and long-term olfactory memory in individual Camponotus fellah ants

“…It may simply be that quinine is not an efficient negative reinforcer for ants, unlike vertebrates. Recent findings on honeybee taste support this idea (de Brito Sanchez et al, 2006;de Brito Sanchez et al, 2007). Behavioural and electrophysiological explorations of gustatory sensilla on the antennae of bees failed to detect any response to bitter substances, which would be perceived as being not so different from water.…”

Honeybees and nectar nicotine: Deterrence and reduced survival versus potential health benefits

“…Nicotine gives nectar a bitter taste, but honeybees have been assumed to have poor taste perception, as they possess only ten gustatory receptors, compared to more than 60 gustatory receptors identified in other insects (Robertson and Wanner, 2006). Accumulating evidence, however, suggests that honeybees are indeed able to detect secondary metabolites Singaravelan et al, 2005;Wright et al, 2010), and their taste perception is likely to be more complex than assumed from the number of gustatory receptors (de Brito Sanchez et al, 2007 Wright et al (2010) have recently shown that gustatory receptors on the proboscis do respond to such substances. Honeybees are less likely to drink sucrose-quinine solutions presented to the proboscis as the toxin concentration increases (Wright et al, 2010).…”

How to know which food is good for you: bumblebees use taste to discriminate between different concentrations of food differing in nutrient content

“…To address this question, we used absolute and differential conditioning of the proboscis extension response (PER), which was used to test associative learning (Takeda, 1961;Vareschi, 1971) and relies on the bees' behavior to extend their proboscis when their antennae, tarsi or parts of the mouth are touched with a sugar solution (de Brito Sanchez et al, 2007). The sugar solution represents the unconditioned stimulus (US) (Bitterman et al, 1983).…”