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      Bees as Biosensors: Chemosensory Ability, Honey Bee Monitoring Systems, and Emergent Sensor Technologies Derived from the Pollinator Syndrome

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          Abstract

          This review focuses on critical milestones in the development path for the use of bees, mainly honey bees and bumble bees, as sentinels and biosensors. These keystone species comprise the most abundant pollinators of agro-ecosystems. Pollinating 70%–80% of flowering terrestrial plants, bees and other insects propel the reproduction and survival of plants and themselves, as well as improve the quantity and quality of seeds, nuts, and fruits that feed birds, wildlife, and us. Flowers provide insects with energy, nutrients, and shelter, while pollinators are essential to global ecosystem productivity and stability. A rich and diverse milieu of chemical signals establishes and maintains this intimate partnership. Observations of bee odor search behavior extend back to Aristotle. In the past two decades great strides have been made in methods and instrumentation for the study and exploitation of bee search behavior and for examining intra-organismal chemical communication signals. In particular, bees can be trained to search for and localize sources for a variety of chemicals, which when coupled with emerging tracking and mapping technologies create novel potential for research, as well as bee and crop management.

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          Most cited references125

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          The flight paths of honeybees recruited by the waggle dance.

          In the 'dance language' of honeybees, the dancer generates a specific, coded message that describes the direction and distance from the hive of a new food source, and this message is displaced in both space and time from the dancer's discovery of that source. Karl von Frisch concluded that bees 'recruited' by this dance used the information encoded in it to guide them directly to the remote food source, and this Nobel Prize-winning discovery revealed the most sophisticated example of non-primate communication that we know of. In spite of some initial scepticism, almost all biologists are now convinced that von Frisch was correct, but what has hitherto been lacking is a quantitative description of how effectively recruits translate the code in the dance into flight to their destinations. Using harmonic radar to record the actual flight paths of recruited bees, we now provide that description.
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            Revisiting olfactory classical conditioning of the proboscis extension response in honey bees: a step toward standardized procedures.

            The honey bee Apis mellifera has emerged as a robust and influential model for the study of classical conditioning thanks to the existence of a powerful Pavlovian conditioning protocol, the olfactory conditioning of the proboscis extension response (PER). In 2011, the olfactory PER conditioning protocol celebrated its 50 years since it was first introduced by Kimihisa Takeda in 1961. In this protocol, individually harnessed honey bees are trained to associate an odor with sucrose solution. The resulting olfactory learning is fast and induces robust olfactory memories that have been characterized at the behavioral, neuronal and molecular levels. Despite the success of this protocol for studying the bases of learning and memory at these different levels, innumerable procedural variants have arisen throughout the years, which render comparative analyses of behavioral performances difficult. Moreover, because even slight variations in conditioning procedures may introduce significant differences in acquisition and retention performances, we revisit olfactory PER conditioning and define here a standardized framework for experiments using this behavioral protocol. To this end, we present and discuss all the methodological steps and details necessary for successful implementation of olfactory PER conditioning. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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              Ontogeny of orientation flight in the honeybee revealed by harmonic radar.

              Cognitive ethology focuses on the study of animals under natural conditions to reveal ecologically adapted modes of learning. But biologists can more easily study what an animal learns than how it learns. For example, honeybees take repeated 'orientation' flights before becoming foragers at about three weeks of age. These flights are a prerequisite for successful homing. Little is known about these flights because orienting bees rapidly fly out of the range of human observation. Using harmonic radar, we show for the first time a striking ontogeny to honeybee orientation flights. With increased experience, bees hold trip duration constant but fly faster, so later trips cover a larger area than earlier trips. In addition, each flight is typically restricted to a narrow sector around the hive. Orientation flights provide honeybees with repeated opportunities to view the hive and landscape features from different viewpoints, suggesting that bees learn the local landscape in a progressive fashion. We also show that these changes in orientation flight are related to the number of previous flights taken instead of chronological age, suggesting a learning process adapted to changes in weather conditions, flower availability and the needs of bee colonies.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Academic Editor
                Journal
                Biosensors (Basel)
                Biosensors (Basel)
                biosensors
                Biosensors
                MDPI
                2079-6374
                30 October 2015
                December 2015
                : 5
                : 4
                : 678-711
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Bee Alert Technology, Inc., 91 Campus Drive, PMB# 2604, Missoula, MT 59801, USA; E-Mails: bobseccomb@ 123456gmail.com (R.A.S.); phwelch@ 123456mindspring.com (P.M.W.)
                [2 ]Division of Biological Sciences, University of Montana, 32 Campus Drive, Missoula, MT 59812, USA; E-Mail: scott.debnam@ 123456umontana.edu
                [3 ]Missoula College, University of Montana, 32 Campus Drive, Missoula, MT 59812, USA; E-Mail: colin.henderson@ 123456umontana.edu
                [4 ]School of Business Administration, University of Montana, 32 Campus Drive, Missoula, MT 59812, USA; E-Mail: david.firth@ 123456umontana.edu
                Author notes
                [* ]Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail: beeresearch@ 123456aol.com ; Tel.: +1-406-544-9007; Fax: +1-406-243-4128.
                Article
                biosensors-05-00678
                10.3390/bios5040678
                4697140
                26529030
                f31e6328-f465-4551-ae1e-b213e740cd07
                © 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

                This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

                History
                : 07 May 2015
                : 05 October 2015
                Categories
                Review

                honey bees,biosensors,proboscis extension reflex,scent,bee counters,scale hives,infra-red imaging,lidar,rfid

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