Meeting Abstract
We used Proboscis Extension Response (PER) and Spatial Avoidance Conditioning (SAC) assays to examine differences in appetitive and aversive (respectively) reversal learning across two honey bee subspecies: Apis mellifera caucasica (Pollman), and Apis mellifera syriaca (Skorikov) in a “common garden” apiary. These subspecies are indigenous to very different environments: Apis mellifera caucasica inhabits temperate deciduous forests in the northeast of Anatolia and the eastern Black Sea coast regions of Turkey, whose weather limits foraging to a small seasonal period. Contrastingly, A. mellifera syriaca inhabits rocky mountains and plains in the Hatay region of Turkey, a generally dry habitat with longer seasonal foraging periods constrained by periodic blooms of one or few flowers. In the initial phase of the tests, bees were trained to respond to rewarded conditioned stimuli (CS+) and not to an unrewarded conditioned stimuli (CS-). During the second phase, the rewarded and unrewarded conditioned stimuli were reversed. The ability to reverse a learned paradigm or sequence becomes important for foraging plasticity in changing environments. We found no significant differences among the species in the first phase of the trials in either aversive or appetitive learning situations. During the second phase A. mellifera syriaca showed a reduced ability to learn the reversed association, in both aversive and appetitive learning tasks. This observation is consistent with the hypothesis that differences in behavioral responses are due to adaptation to the ancestral environments of these bees.
