Scientists have found the gene responsible for navigation in honey bees, which leads them to flowers and guides them back to their hives.
Honey bees use the sun as a reference point in navigation and communication, but what happens when honeybees direct themselves into an irregular path foraging for food. Scientists have answered this question by finding a gene in honey bees, which helps them in learning and detecting unique environments. When honey bees forage for food in new environments, the activity of the regulatory gene in the brain increases.
Such a unique activity of the gene, called Egr, increases in the region of the brain known as the mushroom bodies when honey bees find themselves in unknown environment, according to the researchers of the study.
"This discovery gives us an important lead in figuring out how honey bees are able to navigate so well, with such a tiny brain," said Gene Robinson, a professor of entomology and neuroscience and director of the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois. "And finding that it's Egr, with all that this gene is known to do in vertebrates, provides another demonstration that some of the molecular mechanisms underlying behavioral plasticity are deeply conserved in evolution."
Researchers found that the Egr activity was exclusively in response to the honey bees' contact with new environment. Egr was not observed during exercise or in any other learning processes such as flying.
The study was supported by The National Institutes of Health and published online in The Journal of Experimental Biology.
