SELECTION ON A HAPLOID GENOTYPE FOR DISCRIMINATION-LEARNING PERFORMANCE - CORRELATION BETWEEN DRONE HONEY-BEES (APIS-MELLIFERA) AND THEIR WORKER PROGENY (HYMENOPTERA, APIDAE)

Successful bidirectional selection for discriminative olfactory learning is reported for drone honey bees (Apis mellifera). Learning performance was evaluated using a discrimination conditioning procedure that required drones to discriminate between an appetitively reinforced odorant and one that was followed by punishment, Selective breeding produced high - and low - learning-performance lines of worker progeny that diverged from performance of workers whose fathers were selected at random. Furthermore, we show that levels of sucrose-induced sensitization are not correlated to learning performance. These results corroborate earlier findings and further demonstrate the power of selection on a haploid (drone) genotype, In addition, this study now shows that the demonstrated differences in learning performance cannot be completely accounted for by alteration of sucrose-induced sensitization. Thus, using this technique, it may be possible to select for associative conditioning without a pleiotropic increase in sensitization, The honey bee will be ideally suited to these types of correlation analyses in future studies.