Dr Elisa Frasnelli: Neurocognitive and Behavioural Aspects of Bees
In this week seminar, we were delighted to have Dr Elisa Frasnelli present her research on neurocognitive and behavioural aspects of bees. Dr Frasnelli works as a senior lecturer at the University of Lincoln. She graduated from the University of Trento in Applied Physics. Later she completed her PhD here on Cognitive and Behavioural Sciences in 2011, focusing on lateralisation in invertebrates. She received a post-doctoral fellowship award from the Konrad Lorenz Institute for her work, and was later awarded the JSPS fellowship in Japan in 2017.
Within the topic of neurocognition and behaviour of bees, Dr Frasnelli introduced her research on the lateralisation of bees and its role in learning and recall. Giving us a brief understanding of the brain, she describes the right hemisphere’s specialisation in learning behavioural routines, and the left’s in unexpected and novel stimuli. She explained the honeybees ability to associate a visual stimulus with a reward within a very few trials, which is known as the PER (Proboscis Extension Reflex) paradigm. In learning sensory information, it has been proposed that bees respond better to learning odours when trained through the right antenna, with short term memory only possible when the bee uses its right antenna. This may be due to more sensilla being present in the right antenna compared to the left, different discrimination abilites or different protein expression between the right and left hemisphere.
The second area of discussion was learning flights. Bees perform learning flights when they leave important locations such as the nest, and this mediates their ability to find their way back to that site. To investigate this issue, she set up 2 tables, 1 containing the feeder location and the other one being the nest. The learning flights to both the feeder and the nest became shorter as the trials progressed. Overall the data showed that the learning flights to the feeder were shorter than the learning flights to the nest and LNs expanded over a larger area. To test the accuracy and persistency of search and landing, a purple ring was added in the area of the nest and the feeder. Without the ring, there was no difference in accuracy of landing positions, but with the ring there was precise landing in both cases.
Dr Frasnelli concluded with a study that uses virtual reality to investigate visuomotor mechanisms. The bees use optic flow to reconstruct 2D images of the world into 3D which helps them to navigate, identify and target objects, aid their flight, etc. To investigate this further, Frasnelli and her colleagues set up a virtual arena which allowed them to observe more challenging conditions in this line of study such as investigating collisions and the way bees negotiate with obstacles. The bees were trained to associate a blue circle with food and the researchers tracked the movement of bees in response to different conditions. One of these conditions was a raised floor which found that the bees perceived the virtual reality as real. Another condition included a virtual hole/platform which the target could be seen through and the bee proceeded to go through the hole or around the platform to reach the target despite it not really being there — the same goes for a condition with an incongruent hole or platform. In all conditions the bees tended to avoid collisions in virtual reality. The researchers concluded that when the bees perception of visual depth cues are tested, optic flow was the primary cue to follow.
It was a pleasure to listen to the insightful research that Dr Elisa Frasnelli and her colleagues conducted. We wish her success in her future research endeavours.
