Temporal effects of sugar intake on fly local search and honey bee dance behaviour

Abstract

Honey bees communicate navigational information of profitable food to nestmates via dance, a small scale walking pattern. Hungry flies and honey bee foragers initiate a sugarelicited local search that involves path integration and show similarities with dance behaviour. Using a comparative approach, we explored the temporal dynamics of initiation of local search and dance in flies and honey bees, respectively. Passive displacement experiments showed that feeding and initiation of search can be spatially dissociated in both species. Sugar intake increased the probability to initiate a search but onset of walking starts the path integration system guiding the search. When prevented from walking, the motivation to begin a path integration-based search was sustained for 3 min after sugar intake in flies and bees. In flies, the behavioural parameters of search were significantly reduced for 3 min but were higher than flies that were given no sugar stimulus, indicating some degree of meander. These results suggest that sugar elicits two independent behavioural responses: path integration and increased turning, and initiation and duration of path integration system is temporally more restricted. Honey bee dance experiments demonstrated that the motivation of foragers to initiate dance was sustained for 15 min, whereas the number of circuits declined after 3 min. Based on our findings, we propose that the food-intake during foraging has the capability to activate the path integration system in flies and honey bees, and this interaction might have been elaborated during evolution to guide the walking pattern of the honey bee dance.

Exploration and exploitation are flexibly balanced during local search in flies

“…Recent technological advances have enabled quantification of increasingly naturalistic behaviors at high spatial and temporal resolution (Alisch et al, 2018; Barlow et al, 2022; Bath et al, 2014; Branson et al, 2009; Mathis et al, 2018). Studies in flies and bees have used these advances to gain insights into navigational aspects of local search in insects, exploring primarily how animals return to a known food source (Brockmann et al, 2018; Corrales-Carvajal et al, 2016; Kim and Dickinson, 2017; Murata et al, 2017; Shakeel and Brockmann, 2023; Titova et al, 2023). Later studies have substituted the real food with optogenetic activation of various sensory and brain neurons, to simplify the assay and identify potential neuronal elements involved in eliciting search (Corfas et al, 2019; Haberkern et al, 2019).…”