Ontogeny

  • Learning relies on an animal's interaction with its environment
  • A honey bee learns to forage and feed throughout its lifetime
  • Pankiw and Page showed that the age of initial foraging and the conditions in the hive combine to create a variety of bee foraging phenotypes (Pankiw and Page 2001)

  • By measuring the bees’ sensory response to stimuli using the PER (see mechanism page), researchers have been able to correlate a bee’s likelihood of “sticking out its tongue” to its ability to learn.

  • Using the PER as a guide, scientists have shown that early life experiences and care for a developing bee shapes its cognitive skills (Scheiner, 2012)
  • The older, smarter, bigger bees will make the best foragers while the younger, dimmer bees stay behind to care for the hive


  • The heritability of learning divides the hive's social structure into its strict hierarchical domains.