Time memory in social insects with a special focus on honey bees.

Abstract

The ability to associate time and location with food sources is an evolutionary advantage for foraging animals. We find highly sophisticated time memory capabilities especially in social insects, which require efficient foraging capabilities for colony provisioning. Honey bees are perfectly suitable to study time memory mechanisms: they possess an elaborated time memory combined with a relatively simple neuronal clock network and a smaller gene set compared with the mouse model organism. This review provides a short overview majorly across insects, which have demonstrated time memory capabilities, with a focus on time-place learning, and describes basic properties as well as state-of-the-art research connecting time memory with the circadian clock at the behavioral, molecular and neuroanatomical level. Despite a long history of research on time memory of honey bees, putative connections between clock and time memory have only recently been identified and imply a rather complex regulation mechanism with multiple signaling pathways.