Meeting Abstract
Bumblebees are critical pollinators in both natural and agricultural ecosystems; they are effective pollinators of crops such as cranberries, blueberries, cucumbers, and numerous native flowering plant species. Their generalist floral preferences, ability to tolerate cold, ability to forage at high altitudes and “buzz” pollination contribute to the important role they play in pollination ecology. In contrast to honeybees, bumblebees do not directly communicate resource location to their nestmates. Therefore, individual foragers will often be searching out foraging patches. As previous work has shown that bumblebees can use olfaction to navigate in laboratory settings and are capable of associating specific odors with food rewards, it is likely that bumblebees can use floral odors to help locate resources in a field setting. However, in the field bumblebees will not be experiencing unpolluted floral odors; rather floral scents exist within a mélange of environmental odors. We are interested in understanding how olfactory pollution does, or does not, impact associative olfactory learning in bumblebees. To that end, this study uses Pavlovian conditioning and the proboscis extension reflex (PER) to train bees to associate lavender with a sucrose reward. The scent is then contaminated with biologically relevant odors; some that are structurally similar to lavender, and others that are markedly different. This will allow us to determine how similar, or dissimilar, a polluting odor needs to be in order to disrupt the bumblebees’ olfactory association. Given past work on the negative effects of agrochemical odor pollution on bumblebee foraging behavior, this study should shed light on the mechanistic underpinnings of behavioral changes due to odor contamination.
