Flying insects use the optic flow to navigate safely in unfamiliar environments, especially by adjusting their speed and their clearance from surrounding objects. It has not yet been established, however, which specific parts of the optical flow field insects use to control their speed. With a view to answering this question, freely flying honeybees were trained to fly along a specially designe...

The honeybee, Apis mellifera L. (Hymenoptera: Apidae), a keystone pollinator of wild plant species and agricultural crops, is disappearing globally due to parasites diseases, habitat loss, genetic constraints, beekeeper management issues the widespread use pesticides. Besides insecticides, widely studied in this species, honeybees are also exposed herbicides fungicides heavy metals whose lethal...

Conditioned inhibition or CI training (A+/AB-) was compared with S- training (A+/B-) in three experiments on proboscis-extension conditioning in harnessed honeybees. The purpose was to test the Rescorla-Wagner assumption, widely credited in the vertebrate literature, that a nonreinforced stimulus acquires inhibitory properties in proportion to the excitatory value of the context in which it is ...

Previous experiments with honeybees (Apis mellifera) failed to show learned control of performance by short-ten memory. In this study, honeybees were trained with an improved technique to choose 1 of 2 colors that was either the same as a recently rewarded sample (perseveration) or different (alteration). Because any increase in associative strength stemming from the sample experience would ten...

The Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV) is a significant marker of honeybee colony collapse disorder (CCD). In the present work, we provide the first evidence that Varroa destructor is IAPV replication-competent and capable of vectoring IAPV in honeybees. The honeybees became infected with IAPV after exposure to Varroa mites that carried the virus. The copy number of IAPV in bees was positivel...

The best available evidence of inhibitory conditioning in vertebrates comes from experiments in which variants of A+/AB- and A+/B- training were compared in terms of response to B in summation and retardation tests, the results suggesting that inhibition is generated by nonreinforcement as an increasing function of the excitatory value of the setting. We report here 7 experiments with foraging ...