> Can you find them for those of us on the List? It would be a great Holiday present.
I remember reading about the experiments of moving bees long distances to suss out the circadian rhythms. Probably can dig something up. Here are some clues
What are probably the only examples of learned feeding rhythms in insects occur in the Hymenoptera. Virtually all the research has been done on the honey bee, Apis mellifera, and related species, though ants, too, may possibly be able to learn feeding times (see Wilson, 1971). The adaptive value for bees in being able to feed at specific sites at specific times of day relates to the fact that flowers are rhythmic in their secretion of nectar and presentation of pollen (see Renner, 1960). Bees have an extremely refined ability to time their foraging, and can be taught (in the field) to come to artificial food sources at up to nine different times per day (Koltermann, 1971). They will even remember to come to the correct scent at the correct time, if trained to two scents at two different times.
This very precise timing ability is evidently a function of their underlying circadian clock. They ignore local time and continue to forage at their correct circadian time when translocated through several time zones (Renner, 1957),have a free-running rhythm of feeding in LL (with a period of c. 23.4 h), and cannot be trained to feed at cycles which differ by more than 2 h from the 24 (Beier, 1968; their rhythm of locomotor activity is also circadian, with a free-running period of c. 22 h in DD, Spangler, 1972). As might be expected, the clock mechanism which underlies this ability to feed at specific times is also involved in the time compensation of their sun-compass orientation (Beier and Lindauer, 1970). How bees manage to couple their foraging behaviour to this clock in a manner which permits them to divide the day into as many as nine segments is completely unknown, but clearly indicates a more sophisticated system than that possessed by any other organism.
source
Brady, J. (1974). The physiology of insect circadian rhythms. Advances in insect physiology, 10, 1-115.
references
Beier, W. and Lindauer, M. (1970). Der Sonnenstand als Zeitgeber fiir die Biene. Apidologie, 1, 5-28.
Koltermann. R. (1971). 24-Std-Periodik in der Langzeiterinnerung an Duft- und Farbsignale bei der Honigbiene. Z. uergl. Physiol. 75,49-68.
Renner, M. (1957). Neue Versuche iiber den Zeitsinn der Honigbiene. Z. vergl. Physiol. 40, 85-118.
Renner, M. (1960). The contribution of the honey bee to the study of time-sense and astronomical orientation. Cold Spring Harb. Symp. Quant. Biol. 25, 361-367.
Wilson, E. 0. (1971). “The Insect Societies”. University Press Harvard, Cambridge, Mass.
PLB
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