Summary
The movement of the antennae of bees was optically analysed under laboratory conditions during visual conditioning with a moving stripe pattern. The unconditioned antennal movement towards the midline of the head in response to a sugar-water stimulus to one antenna becomes a conditioned response with the stripe movement as the conditioned stimulus.
Bees can be conditioned to the ventral to dorsal movement of the stripe pattern. Conditioning to the dorsal to ventral direction leads to an increase of the reaction to ventral-dorsal movement (Fig. 2).
A number of bees already responds with significant antennal movements to the moving stripe stimulus in the ventro-dorsal plane of motion before conditioning. These bees cannot be conditioned to the visual stimulus (Fig. 3A).
The conditioned reaction is extinct after about 5 tests without a reward (Fig. 3B).
No specific conditioning effects can be shown for the anterior to posterior direction of stripe movement (Fig. 4).
Control experiments (pseudoconditioning and sensitization) indicate that there are response changes due to feeding with sugar-water. These unspecific response variations are significantly different from the responses after conditioning (Fig. 6).
Associative and nonassociative learning in this preparation opens the possibility of studying the underlying neural processes.
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We wish to thank R. Menzel, U. Homberg, and J. Milde for their comments on the manuscript. This work was supported by DFG grant Me 365,6.
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Erber, J., Schildberger, K. Conditioning of an antennal reflex to visual stimuli in bees (Apis mellifera L.). J. Comp. Physiol. 135, 217–225 (1980). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00657249
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00657249