Meeting Abstract
Honey bees exposed to aggression-inducing social cues undergo a shift in brain energy metabolism that causes an enhanced response to future threats. The function of this metabolic shift is largely unknown. In a variety of organisms, diet restriction also leads to changes in brain energy metabolism that resemble those seen in the aggressive honey bee brain; thus we hypothesize that diet restriction and aggression-inducing social cues alter neural function using similar brain metabolic mechanisms. To begin to evaluate this possibility, we assessed whether diet restriction leads to increased aggression in honey bees. We found that long-term exposure to low-carbohydrate diets increased aggression. Short-term exposure to diet restriction had no effect on aggressive behavior, suggesting the effects of diet are distinct from acute changes in hunger state. We also measured general activity levels for diet restricted bees and found that, in contrast to the aggression results, activity increased predominantly in response to short-term diet restriction. Our results suggest that social cues and diet restriction may act through similar mechanisms to affect aggressive behavior. This result is particularly interesting in the honey bee, where we recently showed that larval bees exposed to high aggression social environments are more aggressive as adults; this social effect could be directly mediated by variation in larval diet. Though the specific neural functional outcomes of a shift in brain energy metabolism are unknown, molecular data from aggressive bee brains and diet-restricted brains in other species show evidence of increased neural plasticity. Thus the shift in metabolism could be central to changes in neural structure across social and non-social contexts.
