Newly Discovered Gene Helps Honey Bees Find Food and Home

According to the University of Illinois Institute for Genomic Biology, scientists have discovered just how honey bees detect nutrients in flowers.

According to a press release, before the bugs forage, they learn to navigate the changing landscape in relation to the sun.

Researchers believe that a regulatory gene known to be involved in the learning and detection of novelty in vertebrates also kicks into high gear in the brains of the bees as they forage for food to potentially bring home.

Honey Bee Haven reports that many bee bases are going extinct. In fact, since the mid-1990s, they've been dying off in droves, as colonies have been mysteriously collapsing with adult bees disappearing and abandoning their hives.

The press release notes that an activity of the gene, called Egr, is quickly released in a region f the brain known as the mushroom bodies whenever bees try to find their way around an unfamiliar environment. This gene is referred to as the insect equivalent of a transcription factor that's found in mammals and regulates the activity of other genes.

According to the release, the physical demands of learning to fly or the memorizing visual clues can be daunting. "It increased only in response to the bee's exposure to an unfamiliar environment," it notes.

"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'sEgr, 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." 
Robinson led the study with graduate student Claudia Lutz.

A paper describing the work appears in The Journal of Experimental Biology.