HEARING IN HONEYBEES - OPERANT-CONDITIONING AND SPONTANEOUS REACTIONS TO AIRBORNE SOUND

Airborne sound signals emitted by dancing bees (Apis mellifera) play an essential role in the bees' dance communication. It has been shown earlier that bees can learn to respond to airborne sounds in an aversive conditioning paradigm. Here we present a new training paradigm. A Y-choice situation was used to determine the frequency range and amplidtude thresholds of hearing in bees. In addition, spontaneous reactions of bees to airborne sound were observed and used to determine thresholds of hearing. Both methods revealed that bees are able to detect sound frequencies up to about 500 Hz. The hearing threshold is 100-300 mm/s peak-to-peak velocity and is roughly constant over the range of detectable frequencies. The amplitude of the signals emitted in the dance language is 5 to 10 times higher, so we can conclude that bees can easily detect the dance sounds.