Ontogeny of orientation flight in the honeybee revealed by harmonic radar

Cognitive ethology focuses on the study of animals under natural conditions to reveal ecologically adapted modes of learning. But biologists can more easily study what an animal learns than how it learns. For example, honeybees take repeated 'orientation' flights before becoming foragers at about three weeks of age. These flights are a prerequisite for successful homing. Little is known about these flights because orienting bees rapidly fly out of the range of human observation. Using harmonic radar, we show for the first time a striking ontogeny to honeybee orientation flights. With increased experience, bees hold trip duration constant but fly faster, so later trips cover a larger area than earlier trips. In addition, each flight is typically restricted to a narrow sector around the hive. Orientation flights provide honeybees with repeated opportunities to view the hive and landscape features from different viewpoints, suggesting that bees learn the local landscape in a progressive fashion. We also show that these changes in orientation flight are related to the number of previous flights taken instead of chronological age, suggesting a learning process adapted to changes in weather conditions, flower availability and the needs of bee colonies.     

Mitotic EBNA-positive lymphocytes in peripheral blood during infectious mononucleosis

Infectious mononucleosis (IM) is usually a benign lymphoproliferative disease caused by Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). Although EBV induces a state of continuous proliferation in infected B lymphocytes in vitro, the most prominent lymphoproliferation during IM is of activated, or atypical, T lymphocytes presumably responding to the virus or virus-infected cells. However, EBV genome-carrying cells are known to be circulating during IM, as cultured peripheral blood leukocytes from patients with the disease give rise to continuous lymphoblastoid cell lines, each cell of which contains the EBV genome and expresses the EBV determined nuclear antigen (EBNA). The proposal that EBV-infected cells in IM blood are not endowed with enhanced growth potential but are merely latently infected is supported by demonstrations that cells infected in vivo enter a viral replicative cycle when placed in vitro and that most cell lines derived from cultured lymphocytes of IM patients are infected by virus released in vitro. However the cells could also be capable of proliferation in vivo, since virus production and transformation are not mutually exclusive properties of EBV-transformed cells. Recently, EBNA has been detected in a very small fraction of peripheral blood lymphocytes of IM patients after T cells were first removed and this has been interpreted to indicate that cell transformation occurs in vivo during IM. The isolation of colonies of EBNA-positive cells from IM blood leukocytes cultures in soft agar suggests that at least some infected cells are capable of direct outgrowth into transformed cells. We report here direct evidence that circulating EBV-infected cells exhibit increased growth properties during IM.