-This review will focus on the relationships between sensory responses of bees and behavior. Sensory responsiveness constrains individual foraging plasticity and skews collective foraging decisions of colonies. We will concentrate on pollen, nectar, and water foraging behavior and will show that differences in the sucrose responsiveness of bees correlate with different behavioral roles, which supports the response threshold model of division of labor. We will also show how a colony's "allocation" of foragers into foraging roles results from individual differences in responsiveness to task-related stimuli and discuss hypotheses on the behavioral relevance of these differences.behavioral plasticity / sucrose responsiveness / foraging behavior / collective decision / response threshold model

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Using the proboscis extension response we conditioned pollen and nectar foragers of the honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) to tactile patterns under laboratory conditions. Pollen foragers demonstrated better acquisition, extinction, and reversal learning than nectar foragers. We tested whether the known differences in response thresholds to sucrose between pollen and nectar foragers could explain the observed differences in learning and found that nectar foragers with low response thresholds performed better during acquisition and extinction than ones with higher thresholds. Conditioning pollen and nectar foragers with similar response thresholds did not yield differences in their learning performance. These results suggest that differences in the learning performance of pollen and nectar foragers are a consequence of differences in their perception of sucrose. Furthermore, we analysed the effect which the perception of sucrose reward has on associative learning. Nectar foragers with uniform low response thresholds were conditioned using varying concentrations of sucrose. We found significant positive correlations between the concentrations of the sucrose rewards and the performance during acquisition and extinction. The results are summarised in a model which describes the relationships between learning performance, response threshold to sucrose, concentration of sucrose and the number of rewards.

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Aging is associated with cognitive impairment in numerous animal species. Across taxa, decline in learning performance is linked to chronological age. The honey bee (Apis mellifera), in contrast, offers an opportunity to study such aspects of aging largely independent of age per se. This is because foraging onset can be decoupled from chronological age, although workers typically first perform tasks inside the nest and later forage outside the hive. Further, early phases of foraging are characterized by growth of specific brain neuropiles, whereas late phases of the forager life-stage are accompanied by accelerated rates of physiological senescence. Yet, it is unclear if these patterns of senescence include cognitive function. The flexibility of worker ontogeny, however, suggests that the bee can become an attractive model for studies of plasticity in cognitive aging that ultimately may lead to insight into mechanisms that govern age-related cognitive decline. To address this potential, we studied effects of honey bee chronological age and of social role on sensory sensitivity and associative olfactory learning performance. Our results show a decline in olfactory acquisition performance that is linked to social role, but not to chronological age. This decline occurs only in foragers with long foraging duration, but at the same time the foragers show less generalization of odors, which is indicative of more precise learning. Foragers that are reversed from foraging to nest tasks, furthermore, do not show deficits in olfactory acquisition. These results point to complex effects of aging on associative learning in honey bees.