Researchers Find Gene that Helps Honey Bees Navigate

Honey bees learn to go about foraging by understanding the landscape and orienting themselves in relation to the sun. New research has shown that a certain gene in the brain of the bees is associated with their ability to navigate around unfamiliar surroundings.

Honey bees use a regulatory gene - called Egr - to learn about their environment. Egr found in the insects is similar to the transcription factor found in mammals; its induction has been associated with neuronal activity. The gene's expression rises in the region of the brain whenever bees try to navigate around an unknown environment. The part of the brain where the activity of the gene increases is called as mushroom bodies.

Researchers from University of Illinois, who conducted the study to understand the genetic basis of the bees' learning ability, found that the expression of the gene was solely dependent on the need to understand a new environment, and not on other activities such as flying or memorizing visual cues.

"This discovery gives us an important lead in figuring out how honey bees are able to navigate so well, with such a tiny brain. And finding that it's Egr, 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," said Gene Robinson, a professor of entomology and neuroscience and director of the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois, according to a news release.

The study is published in The Journal of Experimental Biology.