Meeting Abstract
The European Honey bee, Apis mellifera , is a generalist and forages on many different flowers. In order to orient themselves to high reward sources A. mellifera uses the color and fragrance of flowers. The extent to which color and scent can be important is not well understood. This experiment seeks to determine if scent itself is a reward or if it is a learning cue. To conduct this experiment feeders were used to lure bees to an artificial flower patch with pink, blue, and white colored flowers. The bees were then subjected to series of different assays with varying sucrose molarities, color, and scent combinations. We found that the bees only visited flowers with scent more frequently than those without when the scented flowers had higher molarity solutions. Additionally, we found that when put through more than one phase the bees failed to modify their behavior to follow the higher reward. This shows that honey bees do not treat scent as a reward but they do use it as a learning cue. Furthermore, bees can be conditioned to use scent and/or color as a cue for the higher reward, but when presented with this cue without previous experience, or with contradictory previous experience, it is not recognized as a cue.
