Learning and Memory: Do Bees Dream?

A new study by Zwaka et al. reported in this issue of Current Biology has the potential to be equally ground breaking. In their current study, the authors report that memory reactivation during sleep is evolutionarily conserved in the honeybee. 

These exciting findings have the potential to be as influential as the original report of reactivation in rodents since it suggests that replay/ reactivation is conserved throughout the animal kingdom and can be evaluated in organisms that are genetically tractable.

There are a shocking number of similarities between invertebrate and human sleep. Surprisingly, while the relationship between sleep and memory has been clearly demonstrated in the fly, it has remained unclear whether invertebrates are also able to reactivate memories during sleep like humans and rodents.

Most importantly, the bee expresses three different sleep stages that can be identified by behavioral characteristics which can be monitored in real-time. The deepest stage of sleep is associated with complete immobility of the antennae. This is important because, in contrast to other invertebrate models, sleep depth can be identified without having to disturb the animal.

Zwaka, H., Bartels, R., Gora, J., Franck, V., Culo, A., Gotsch, M., and Menzel, R. (2015). Sleep to remember: Context odor presentation during sleep enhances memory in honeybees. Curr. Biol. 25, 2869–2874.

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