Abstract
Honeybees are social insects, and individual bees take on different social roles as they mature, performing a multitude of tasks that involve multi-modal sensory integration. Several activities vital for foraging, like flight and waggle dance communication, involve sensing air vibrations through their antennae. We investigated changes in the identified vibration-sensitive interneuron DL-Int-1 in the honeybee Apis mellifera during maturation by comparing properties of neurons from newly emerged adult and forager honeybees. Although comparison of morphological reconstructions of the neurons revealed no significant changes in gross dendritic features, consistent and region-dependent changes were found in dendritic density. Comparison of electrophysiological properties showed an increase in the firing rate differences between stimulus and nonstimulus periods in foragers compared with newly emerged adult bees. The observed differences in neurons of foragers compared with newly emerged adult honeybees suggest refined connectivity, improved signal propagation, and enhancement of response features possibly important for the network processing of air vibration signals relevant for the waggle dance communication of honeybees.
Footnotes
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
This work was supported by Grant-in-Aids for Scientific Research from the Ministry of Education, Science, Technology, Sports, and Culture of Japan (Grants 22570079, 17K00414, and 18K160345); a Grant (15K14569) for Challenging Exploratory Research from the Strategic International Cooperative Program, Japan Science and Technology Agency; by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Grant 01GQ1116); and by the Central Research Institute of Fukuoka University (Grant 151031). We thank Philipp Rautenberg for contributing to early stages of the project and Hiromu Tanimoto for constructive feedback.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.