> Have a faint memory of a paper, perhaps 15 or 20 years ago that looked at memory retention of orientation to a locale by workers.  But it's very faint.

Thanks, José, for conjuring up that memory, about the "Plasticity of spatial memoryi n honey bees." It appears that swarming bees have the ability to "forget" where they are from, in order to learn their new location. However, the memory is not lost; that is, until the bees begin to get old and lose their ability to remember things. Funny how that happens. The work was followed up and extended:

Generating artificial swarms and subsequent displacement of 
entire honey bee colonies, indicate that bees learn to extinguish 
memory of a previous nest location (Robinson GE, Dyer FC 1993)*

* reference is to the 25 year old paper which José mentioned

Our results suggest that older foragers, on average, are less
capable of expressing new memory that contradicts previously
learned memory. This finding indicates that complex extinction
abilities can be affected during aging in invertebrates.

* the next paragraph contains subject matter which some readers may find puzzling

Old bees are characterized by poor learning performance
and increased performance heterogeneity. The data,
therefore, were explained by a major contribution of stochastic
events with effects on patterns of age-related physiological
deterioration. In consequence, the progression of aging would be
largely unpredictable even when risk factors are known.

* a rough translation is "when the bees get older, the shit is all over the map." It gets like that with people too

¶

Robinson, G. E., & Dyer, F. C. (1993). Plasticity of spatial memory in honey bees: reorientation following colony fission. Animal behaviour, 46(2), 311-320.

Münch D, Baker N, Kreibich CD, Bråten AT, Amdam GV (2010) In the Laboratory and during Free-Flight: Old Honey Bees Reveal Learning and Extinction Deficits that Mirror Mammalian Functional Decline. PLoS ONE 5(10): e13504. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013504

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html