Visually Guided Decision Making in Foraging Honeybees

Abstract

Honeybees can easily be trained to perform different types of discrimination tasks under controlled laboratory conditions. This review describes a range of experiments carried out with free-flying forager honeybees under such conditions. The research done over the past 30 or so years suggests that cognitive abilities (learning and perception) in insects are more intricate and flexible than was originally imagined. It has become apparent that honeybees are capable of a variety of visually guided tasks, involving decision making under challenging situations: this includes simultaneously making use of different sensory modalities, such as vision and olfaction, and learning to use abstract concepts such as “sameness” and “difference.” Many studies have shown that decision making in foraging honeybees is highly flexible. The trained animals learn how to solve a task, and do so with a high accuracy, but when they are presented with a new variation of the task, they apply the learnt rules from the earlier setup to the new situation, and solve the new task as well. Honeybees therefore not only feature a rich behavioral repertoire to choose from, but also make decisions most apt to the current situation. The experiments in this review give an insight into the environmental cues and cognitive resources that are probably highly significant for a forager bee that must continually make decisions regarding patches of resources to be exploited.

Synaptic Organization of Microglomerular Clusters in the Lateral and Medial Bulbs of the Honeybee Brain

“…Extensive behavioral studies have shown that honeybees perceive, learn and memorize colors, shapes and patterns when these visual cues are paired with sucrose reward and that they navigate in their environment using visual cues to find their way back to the hive and to the food sources (Menzel and Backhaus, 1991; Srinivasan, 1994, 2011; Giurfa and Menzel, 1997; Dyer, 2012; Zhang et al, 2012; Avarguès-Weber and Giurfa, 2014). Furthermore, landmarks and celestial cues such as azimuthal position of the sun and polarized light pattern of the sky ensure efficient navigation in a complex environment (Wehner and Rossel, 1985; Rossel and Wehner, 1986; Collett et al, 2003).…”

Conceptual learning by miniature brains

“…Among insects, the honeybee has emerged as a powerful model for the study of associative learning [12,14,15,[19][20][21]. In a natural context, bees learn and memorize the local cues characterizing the places of interest, which are essentially the hive and the food sources [22][23][24][25].…”

The forest or the trees: preference for global over local image processing is reversed by prior experience in honeybees

“…Bees perceive and discriminate various types of visual cues and exhibit sophisticated visually driven behaviours [25,28,29]. A traditional view of insect vision posits that bees perceive only low-level, local visual cues and are incapable of global, holistic perception [30,31] (but see [26,27,29,32]).…”

“…The honeybee Apis mellifera is a privileged invertebrate model for the study of visual perception [24][25][26][27][28]. Bees perceive and discriminate various types of visual cues and exhibit sophisticated visually driven behaviours [25,28,29].…”