A team of researchers from New Zealand and Germany has demonstrated that the honeybee brain generates oscillations which share characteristics of ‘alpha’ oscillations in the human brain.
Popov & Szyszka found a prominent spontaneous oscillation around 18 Hz in the honeybee brain that is reduced in amplitude upon olfactory stimulation. Image credit: PollyDot.
In 1929, German psychiatrist Professor Hans Berger discovered the alpha oscillations: prominent, ongoing oscillations around 10 Hz in the electroencephalogram of the human brain.
These alpha oscillations are among the most widely studied brain signals, related to cognitive phenomena such as attention, memory and consciousness.
However, the mechanisms by which alpha oscillations affect human cognition await demonstration.
The honeybee brain is as an experimentally more accessible model system for investigating the functional role of alpha oscillations.
“As alpha oscillations are associated with brain functions such as; attention, memory, and consciousness, bee brains may provide new avenues to understanding how our own brains work,” said co-author Dr. Paul Szyszka, a scientist in the Department of Zoology at the University of Otago.
“Experiments on humans are expensive, logistically difficult, and time consuming. Moreover, recordings from individual identified neurons are not possible in human brains.”
“By studying the brains of bees we can overcome these limitations and apply that knowledge to research, and eventually perhaps even to treatment, of human brains.”
The study involved nine female forager honeybees (Apis mellifera) from outdoor hives.
In the laboratory, the bees were stimulated with odors, with microscopic electrodes recording their brain activity.
“It is fascinating to see how bees can learn to associate odors with food in a similar way to humans,” Dr. Szyszka said.
“What we want to do now is examine how these alpha oscillations change in different situations.”
“As a neuroethologist, I’m interested in how bees’ alpha oscillations change during natural behaviors, for example when a bee forages or sleeps.”
Dr. Szyszka and his colleague, University of Heidelberg’s Dr. Tzvetan Popov, found that the bee brain generates oscillations (around 18 Hz) which share characteristics of human alpha oscillations.
“We termed these 18 Hz oscillations ‘alpha’ based on their similarity with alpha oscillations in humans (around 10 Hz) and alpha/beta oscillations in non-human primates (10–20 Hz),” they said.
“Similar to primate’s alpha/beta oscillations, honeybees’ 18 Hz oscillations occurred spontaneously, decreased in power during sensory stimulation, and biased spike timing and higher frequency neuronal activity.”
“What is the function of honeybees’ alpha oscillation? Alpha oscillations could regulate the information transmission between brain regions.”
The findings were published in the February 19, 2020 issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
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Tzvetan Popov & Paul Szyszka. 2020. Alpha oscillations govern interhemispheric spike timing coordination in the honey bee brain. Proc. R. Soc. B 287 (1921); doi: 10.1098/rspb.2020.0115
