Memória temporal no forrageamento da abelha sem ferrão Melipona subnitida (Hymenoptera: Apidae)

Abstract

Individual temporal memory allows forage inspectors to act on the colony's short-term memory, allowing the colony to react to rapid changes in their environment, using previously used food sources, in time to spend energy looking for new sources. The objectives of this study were (i) investigate whether Melipona subnitida has temporal memory, assessing whether it becomes more accurate as the days go by, in addition to (ii) verifying individual behavior of forages in anticipatory feeding activity. To this end, we marked 30 foragers in three colonies of M. subnitida (10 foragers/colony), which were trained to visit a artificial feeder with restricted opening time (7:00h-11:00h); and over 5 days We look at visiting hours. Bee visitation was high before and during the feature opening range, but rare after closing, suggesting that M. subnitida has the ability to memorize the resource availability time, increasing accuracy as the days go by, with bees anticipating their visits in relation to the time they discovered and the opening of the fountain. The individual behavior of anticipatory feeding activity was consistent, with the presence of bees that anticipate (inspectors) and bees that do not anticipate (reactivated). foragers that anticipate in the search for a resource allows the group to explore it efficiently, as explores it in the first hours of opening, when it is more abundant, on the other hand, foragers that do not anticipate and expect information from the source, avoid the risk of predation and unnecessary energy expenditure.