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Short term learning and memory of honeybee, Apis mellifera defects when exposed to neonicotinoid insecticides
Learning and memory are essential for animals like honey bee, in which foragers leave their nest to collect food and then successfully learn to navigate back to colony. Chronic environmental exposure of neoniconitiod highly affect pollinators like honey bee. We investigated the effect of neonicotinoid, thiacloprid and imidacloprid on learning, memory and mortality of pollen foragers based on their toxicity level. Individual Pollen foragers Apis mellifera were trained using a proboscis extension proboscis. We used three treatments: 50% sugar solution, 50% sugar contaminated thiacloprid and imidacloprid as unconditioned stimulus and 2M 1-nonanol as conditioned stimulus. Our result shows that there is no significant difference between control and thiacloprid treatment both in learning and mortality of honey bee. But we found difference in memory between subjects exposed to control and thiacloprid contamination. Whereas imidacloprid contamination significantly lowered learning, eradicate memory retention and higher mortality of honey bee. Even thiacloprid and imidacloprid are in the same chemical class of Neonicotinoid insecticides, their toxic level would be different resulting in differential ecological impact to honey bee colony.
