By Susan Milius
Note to plotters of world domination: Don’t get discouraged about your weaker brains.
So-called killer bees have readily displaced the long-established European honeybees throughout Central America and the southern United States. Yet the invaders don’t perform as well as invadees in lab tests of learning and memory, says behavioral ecologist Margaret Couvillon of the University of Sussex in Brighton, England.
In lab tests, fewer of the invasive bees learned to associate a puff of jasmine odor with an upcoming reward of sugar water, Couvillon and her colleagues found. Also, fewer of the invaders that did learn remembered their lesson the next day. The researchers report the findings online November 11 in Naturwissenschaften.