EYE-SPECIFIC LEARNING OF ROUTES AND SIGNPOSTS BY WALKING HONEYBEES

This study investigates the honeybee's ability to learn routes based o n visual stimuli presented to a single eye, and to then navigate these routes using the other (naive) eye. Bees were trained to walk through a narrow tunnel carrying visual stimuli on the two walls. At the end of the tunnel the bees had to choose between two arms, one of which le d to a feeder. In a first experiment, bees had to learn to choose the left arm to get a reward when the right wall carried a yellow grating, but the right arm when the left wall carried a blue grating. The bees learned this task well, indicating that stimuli encountered by differ ent eyes could be associated with different routes. In a second experi ment, bees had to turn left when the right eye saw a blue grating, but to the right when the same eye saw a yellow grating. They also learne d this task well. In subsequent tests, they chose the correct arm even when these gratings were presented to the untrained eye. These result s suggest that there is interocular transfer of route-specific learnin g with respect to visual stimuli that function as navigational ''signp osts''.