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Chemical Senses 15: 111-128,
© 1990

research-article

Odorant moiety and odor mixture perception in free-flying honey bees (Apis mellifera)

Wayne M. Getz and Katherine B. Smith

Department of Entomology and Division of Biological Control, University of California Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

Two experiments are described that employ a Y-tube odor-training paradigm to address questions relating to olfactory perception in free-flying worker honey bees. The first is designed to evaluate how easily bees can be conditioned to discriminate between two odors and how willing they are to generalize between closely related odors. In particular, we demonstrate that individual worker bees have no trouble learning to discriminate between alkyl ketones or alcohols that differ by only one carbon atom (e.g. heptanone versus octanone) or between a ketone and alcohol functional group attached to the same alkyl radical; but they generalize between compounds with the same functional group much more readily than those with the same alkyl radical. The second experiment is designed to explore the relationship between the perception of a mixture of odorants and the perception of the individual odorants themselves. Our results suggest that there appears to be a stronger relationship between a two-odorant mixture and its constituents than would be suggested by the mixture being an odor intermediate between the two constituent odorants. We also include a comprehensive discussion on the problem of extracting quality and concentration information from an odor stimulus and we explore ideas relating to the perception of the constituent odorant components of complex odors.


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