ABSTRACT
Scents play a crucial role in a honey bee’s life. Both in the darkness of the hive and in the outside environment bees encounter an overwhelming array of different scents, from which they retrieve information. The scents they come across are either produced by other bees (pheromones) or originate from the bees’ environment, such as the food processed inside the hive and the owering plants that bees use as food sources. The role of honey bee pheromones during social activities such as mating, reproduction, brood care, kin recognition, swarming, alarm, and defense has been researched and reviewed extensively (Free 1987). Here, we will focus on the role of pheromones as well as oral scents in honey bee foraging and recruitment. The rst section of this chapter introduces the honey bee’s sense of smell: it explains how odors are detected, goes on to describe the bee’s olfactory
Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 165 Honey Bee Olfaction ...................................................................................................................... 166
Mechanism of Odor Detection ................................................................................................... 166 The Honey Bee’s Olfactory System ........................................................................................... 166 Odor Discrimination and Learning in Honey Bees .................................................................... 168
The Honey Bee Scent Environment ............................................................................................... 168 Scent Origin and Chemistry ....................................................................................................... 168 Perception of Complex Scents ................................................................................................... 169
Scent Information Used during Honey Bee Foraging and Recruitment ........................................ 169 Floral Scents as Attractants ........................................................................................................ 170 Scent-Associated Memories of Food Sources ........................................................................... 172 The Nasonov Pheromone ........................................................................................................... 174 Scent Marks on Food Sources .................................................................................................... 176 Trail Pheromones and Scent Trails ............................................................................................ 177 The Dance Pheromone ............................................................................................................... 178
Concluding Remarks ...................................................................................................................... 178 Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... 178 References ...................................................................................................................................... 179
anatomy, how olfactory information is processed, and how bees learn and discriminate scents. The next section introduces scents that typically occur in the honey bee foraging environment and gives some background with respect to the scents’ origin and chemistry. In this section, we also briey discuss how honey bees might perceive and interpret the complex scents they encounter. The main section of this book chapter describes the ways that honey bees make use of scents during foraging and recruitment, and discusses the kind of information bees can obtain and transfer via scents.
