Data associated with "Sublethal Glyphosate Exposure Reduces Honey Bee Foraging and Alters Balance of Biogenic Amines in the Brain"

The herbicide glyphosate (GLY) is increasingly implicated in sublethal behavioral impacts to beneficial insects, but its impact on honey bee foraging and waggle dance recruitment behaviors was insufficiently understood. To address this gap, we trained cohorts of honey bees to collect sucrose solution at one of two artificial feeder stations, either a control feeder (unaltered) or treatment feeder (equimolar sucrose solution plus dissolved GLY at a concentration of 5 mg a.e. / L). We found that bees who collected sublethal GLY for a 3-hour period foraged less frequently than their counterparts foraging at the control feeder. Secondarily, we analyzed the frozen brains of a subset of experimental bees to look for differences in absolute and relative levels of key biogenic amines octopamine, tyramine, and dopamine, as well as their amino acid precursor, tyrosine. We found that sublethal glyphosate exposure induced significant positive correlations in levels of octopamine ~ tyrosine, and tyramine ~ tyrosine.