He devoted an entire chapter of his first book to the topic of directing honey bees to crops through scent-training. He did not reject the dance language, but he too demonstrated that some of von Frisch’s experiments and results were erroneous. In 1953, Ribbands published two books on the behavior and scent language of honey bees. Chemical Signals and Proboscis Extension Reflex Recognizing bees’ exquisite chemosensory ability and capitalizing on these behavioral advantages has stimulated development of a number of new approaches relying on bees as a biosensor system that holds great promise.Ģ.1. In addition, bees tend to be less easily distracted than dogs and do not require the direct guidance of a handler. Whole colonies, 15 or more at a time, can be conditioned in less than three days in open field settings. Compared to dogs which usually take months to train, honey bees can be conditioned or trained to respond to one or several volatile chemical compounds in less than an hour in the laboratory. We also found that like dogs and other vertebrates, invertebrates such as bees learn to associate a particular odor with a reward. This led to our own research into methods and technologies for using bees as living biosensors for a wide variety of chemical signals. Johnson and Wenner showed definitively that bees could be conditioned to search for odors by providing them with a rich syrup reward. In laboratory and field tests, they have proven able to recognize a vast array of different compounds at parts per trillion, even parts per quadrillion, vapor concentrations. Ĭontroverting the common misconception that bees have a poor sense of smell that is not much more refined than that of humans, honey bees have a superb ability to detect chemical signals. He finally returned to bee olfaction research two decades later, incidentally publishing treatises on how science advances in general. Wenner’s hypothesis was met with such strong opposition by dance language advocates that he was forced to re-direct his research away from bees. He also concluded that honey bee recruitment success could be explained solely by their reliance on scent, a hypothesis first proposed and then rejected by von Frisch in 1939. He soon discovered that his predecessors had failed to observe that “bees learn quickly (the conditioned response phenomenon, as with Pavlov and his salivating dogs)” to respond to chemical cues. In the 1960s, Wenner, a professor of natural history and later Provost of the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, focused his doctoral and subsequent research on an expansion of von Frisch’s work. The dance language paradigm for honey bee foraging behavior holds forth, virtually unchallenged, to this day.Īs an unassailable paradigm, the perception that bee foraging is a socially coordinated behavior inhibited serious exploration of the chemosensory abilities of bees. Von Frisch refined his dance language hypothesis over nearly a decade of research and was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1973. Scent-Directed Search is Under Valued by Focus on Dance Languageįirst described by von Frisch in 1937, evidence that an insect society may have a symbolic language that communicates directions and distances of nectar and pollen resources among foragers swept the scientific world by storm. In particular, bees can be trained to search for and localize sources for a variety of chemicals, which when coupled with emerging tracking and mapping technologies create novel potential for research, as well as bee and crop management. In the past two decades great strides have been made in methods and instrumentation for the study and exploitation of bee search behavior and for examining intra-organismal chemical communication signals. Observations of bee odor search behavior extend back to Aristotle. A rich and diverse milieu of chemical signals establishes and maintains this intimate partnership. Flowers provide insects with energy, nutrients, and shelter, while pollinators are essential to global ecosystem productivity and stability. Pollinating 70%–80% of flowering terrestrial plants, bees and other insects propel the reproduction and survival of plants and themselves, as well as improve the quantity and quality of seeds, nuts, and fruits that feed birds, wildlife, and us. These keystone species comprise the most abundant pollinators of agro-ecosystems. This review focuses on critical milestones in the development path for the use of bees, mainly honey bees and bumble bees, as sentinels and biosensors.
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