Meeting Abstract
Forager honey bees (Apis mellifera) are able to remember both the location and time of day food is collected. Foragers reconnoiter a food source at the appropriate time on subsequent days in the absence of food and even after several days of inclement weather. This food-anticipatory activity is under circadian control and enables the forager to synchronize its efforts with nectar secretion rhythms of flowers. This also alleviates the need to rediscover productive food sources each day. We previously showed that foragers with greater amounts of experience exploiting a food source are slower to abandon that source after it ceases to be productive. Here, we ask if such foragers are less recruitable to another food source that is available at the same time of day. We simultaneously trained two groups of foragers from a single hive to two separate feeders. After five days of training, one feeder was shut off. The second feeder continued being productive four more days. Our results show that (1) the majority of visits to both feeders occurred during the original training window and (2) high-experience foragers were more likely than low-experience foragers to maintain fidelity to their original source and resist recruitment to the alternative source. In light of our recent findings that a large proportion of foragers appear to maintain multiple time-memories for multiple food sources, it was also interesting to find that (3) high-experience foragers were more likely than low-experience foragers to be recruited to the alternative source while continuing to reconnoiter their original source, thus managing simultaneous, overlapping time-memories.
