Honey bees can save and remember good and bad memories and keep them in different areas of their brains. They can remember good and bad experiences, comparable to the way humans do it. Humans store good and bad memories in different parts of the brain. Researchers from the University of Urbana-Champaign were eager to study this. They were eager to learn whether the process of storing memories is similar to honey bees.
In order to do this analysis, the researchers exposed honey bees to some positive or negative experience. With this, they wanted to examine will the bees save these different experiences separately. The positive experience consisted of nursing a queen bee larva. In order to represent the negative experience, honey bees had to deal with an intruder bee.
The author of the study – Gene Robinson, for one interview, said: “We wanted to know whether bees, with a tiny brain, devote different parts of it to processing social information that is either negative or positive”.
Consequently to the experiences, the researchers investigated which parts of the brain are the most active as a result. Doing this, the researchers wanted to distinguish some patterns of gene expression.
In addition, Robinson says: “We used genes that respond very quickly to new stimuli as markers to see which parts of the brain are activated for each type of stimulus”.
What did the results show? Can honey bees save and remember good and bad memories?
The conclusion is that honey bees can save and remember good and bad memories in different parts of the brain. These parts are the “mushroom bodies”. The “mushroom bodies” are related to learning and sensory information.
“We found that bees do devote different parts of their brain to processing social information that is either negative or positive,” Robinson stated in his interview. “This discovery is striking given how small their brains are; we did not expect such spatial segregation in the processing of social information of different valence.”