ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to review learning mechanisms that can influence the consolidation and updating of the memory that foraging honeybees form about the association of floral odors with nectar and pollen rewards given off by flowers. It discusses information from the moth and the honeybee. Several different learning protocols have been employed to analyze how insects such as moths and honeybees learn about floral odors. Floral scents, and the compounds found in floral scents, occur over many orders of magnitude in concentration. Floral odors typically arise from mixtures of many odorants. Therefore, any discussion about learning of floral odors must include a discussion of learning about mixtures. Flowers provide a host of visual cues that can serve as important cues themselves or as contexts for learning about odors. Both vertebrate and invertebrate olfactory systems face the constraint, and they have apparently converged on similar means for compressing a multidimensional odor space into a far more limited neural space.
