Smith B H, Cobey S
Department of Entomology, Ohio State University, Columbus 43210-1220.
J Exp Biol. 1994 Oct;195:91-108. doi: 10.1242/jeb.195.1.91.
Proboscis extension conditioning of honeybee workers was used to study the processing of odorants when bees were conditioned to binary mixtures. Responses to a set of pure floral odors and pheromones after conditioning have already been described. When bees are conditioned to certain mixtures of odorants, the response to both components is equal to that when they are tested alone. However, mixtures of an aliphatic aldehyde and an alcohol elicit asymmetric response patterns; that is, the response to the aldehyde is much stronger than that to the alcohol. A bee's response to the alcohol after it had been trained in an aldehyde background is significantly lower than when the bee is trained to respond to the same alcohol in the background of another odorant. Such response patterns are not necessarily caused by a behavioral decrement resulting from a compound-unique perceptual effect produced by the mixture. Furthermore, studies of blocking show that behavioral acquisition in response to one component can be hindered or blocked by pretraining with the other component. These results suggest that honeybees can perceive the individual components of some binary mixtures. The similarities in neural processing in olfactory systems of vertebrates and invertebrates mean that such studies could elucidate behavioral mechanisms of olfaction in a wide phylogenetic spectrum of animals.
蜜蜂工蜂的伸吻反射条件作用被用于研究蜜蜂在二元混合物条件下对气味物质的处理过程。对一组纯花香气味和信息素在条件作用后的反应已有描述。当蜜蜂被训练对某些气味混合物做出反应时，对两种成分的反应等同于单独测试时的反应。然而，脂肪醛和醇的混合物会引发不对称的反应模式；也就是说，对醛的反应比对醇的反应强烈得多。在醛的背景下训练后，蜜蜂对醇的反应明显低于在另一种气味背景下训练对相同醇的反应。这种反应模式不一定是由混合物产生的独特复合感知效应导致的行为衰退引起的。此外，阻断研究表明，对一种成分的行为习得可能会因预先训练另一种成分而受到阻碍或阻断。这些结果表明，蜜蜂能够感知一些二元混合物的单个成分。脊椎动物和无脊椎动物嗅觉系统神经处理的相似性意味着此类研究可以阐明广泛系统发育谱系动物的嗅觉行为机制。
