Honey bees trained to stick out their tongues for science

Biologists at Bielefeld University have trained honey bees to stick out their tongues when their antennae touch an object.

The tactile conditioning study was conducted by a team from the lab of Volker Dürr, professor for biological cybernetics at Bielefeld, and will allow researchers to investigate how the honey bees use touch in pattern recognition and sense memory.

"We work with honey bees because they are an important model system for behavioural biology and neurobiology," explained Dürr. "They can be trained. If you can train an insect to respond to a certain stimulus, then you can ask the bees questions in the form of ‘Is A like B? If so, stick your tongue out’."

The process by which a bee sticks out its tongue when faced with a stimulus is known as the proboscis extension response. It can be conditioned in the bees as a response to a particular textured surface using sugar water. Each time a harnessed honey bee’s antennae touched the surface, the bee was given sugar water. Eventually the bee extends its tongue whenever it touches the right surface.

Currently the biologists are hoping to use the response to find out more about how bees use antennae movements to gather information about their surroundings.

"It is clear that if a bee touches something with an antenna, a finely textured structure, the bee has to move it to get the information it wants," adds Dürr. "We don’t fully understand the relevance of this movement."