Honey Bee See . . . Honey Bee Do?


PLOS (The Public Library of Science) is a non-profit publisher and advocacy organization recently published an article focusing on the work of Reynolds Professor of Developmental Neuroscience Susan Fahrbach and graduate student researcher Scott Dobrin (PhD. 2011).  Fahrbach and her lab group have discovered that it is possible to train honey bees by SHOWING them.  Susan and Scott Dobrin (PhD. 2011) engineered an apparatus to make bee learning a possibility.

The article’s author Rachel Bernstein writes:

Training a dog is hard enough, so just imagine some of the tricks you would have to use to train a honey bee. Despite the difficulties, Scott Dobrin and Susan Fahrbach at Wake Forest University in North Carolina successfully trained honeybees to respond to colored lights for a tasty sucrose treat…

Click here to visit PLOS for the full text article

 

Bee learning “harness” designed by Scott Dobrin (PhD. WFU 2011)