Transcriptomic responses to location learning by honeybee dancers

The waggle dances of honeybees are a strikingly complex form of animal communication that underlie the collective foraging behaviour of colonies. The mechanisms by which bees assess the locations of forage sites that they have visited for representation on the dancefloor have not been fully characterized yet. Here, we explore the gene expression patterns that are induced through individual learning about foraging locations. We show that the mushroom bodies of honeybee dancers display a specific transcriptomic response to learning about distance and direction of the foraging site.