A young brain for an old bee

		IMAGE: While the bee scans the tactile stimulus with her antennae, proboscis extension is elicited. When the bee extends her proboscis, she is rewarded with a droplet of sucrose solution. Click here for more information.

The oldest bees in a colony are the foragers - a task that demands a high amount of energy. With increasing foraging duration, their capacity for associative learning was found to decrease. On the other hand, no decline was observed in nurse bees that remain inside the hive taking care of the brood and the queen, even though their age was the same as that of their foraging sisters. When the scientists artificially forced a subset of these foragers to revert to nursing tasks, they discovered that they learning performance improved again, demonstrating a remarkable plasticity in their brain circuits.