Reward expectations in honeybees

Abstract

The study of expectations of reward helps to understand rules controlling goal-directed behavior as well as decision making and planning. I shall review a series of recent studies focusing on how the food gathering behavior of honeybees depends upon reward expectations. These studies document that free-flying honeybees develop long-term expectations of reward and use them to regulate their investment of energy/time during foraging. Also, they present a laboratory procedure suitable for analysis of neural substrates of reward expectations in the honeybee brain. I discuss these findings in the context of individual and collective foraging, on the one hand, and neurobiology of learning and memory of reward. © 2010 Landes Bioscience.