Aug 20, 2010 14:19 GMT  ·  By

Scientists managed to trick honey bees into thinking they had traveled long distances to find food, and found out that this altered gene expression in their brains.

The study used optical illusion to alter bees' perception of the flown distance, through same-length tunnels, as they discovered that vertical stripes or a busy pattern make the bee think she has been flying a long way, while horizontal stripes or a rarer pattern are associated with a shorter distance.

To see if the experiment was successful, scientists looked at the bee's dance at the end of the flight: after finding food, the forager does a “round dance” if the food is close to home and a “waggle” dance if it's father away.

Study leader and University of Illinois entomology and neuroscience professor Gene Robinson, said that “this is a great example of what you can learn if you are able to manipulate an animal to be able to tell you what it's thinking.”

This survey helps to better understand the socially responsive genome, as it is not a static blueprint as it was once believed.

“Instead we see how responsive the genome is to environmental stimuli and especially socially relevant stimuli, [and] here is another piece of the world that the genome is responding to that we didn't know about before,” he said.

Tracking the activity of thousands of genes at once, researchers made a comparison of the gene expressions within the brains of bees that thought they had traveled shorter or longer distances, focusing on the optic lobes and the mushroom bodies.

The optic lobes process visual information while the mushroom bodies integrate sensory information and contribute to learning and memory.

Bees that traveled the “short” distance several times to get to the food were labeled S-S bees, while those that trained on the “short” distance and were switched to the “long” tunnel were labeled S-L bees.

The expression of brain genes was different between the groups as 29 genes with specific location in the genome, were continuously adjusted between S-S and S-L bees, “either in the optic lobes, mushroom bodies, or both,” noted the researchers.

This study was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Illinois Sociogenomics Initiative, and was published in the journal Genes, Brain and Behavior, Science Daily reports.