Even bees suffer from the Monday blues

Some research questions and experimental designs just leave us in awe of the incredible minds that thought them up, like the creation of CERN to see what happens when they fire tiny particles at each other at incredible speeds. Some leave us wondering if scientists aren't just little boys that never grew up, where instead of pulling the wings off flies or burning ants with a magnifying glass, they keep honeybees awake so that they become cranky and have difficulty learning how to navigate a maze. Interestingly enough, this entirely random preamble helps me segue into an interesting study I read today: Honeybees consolidate navigation memory during sleep:

ABSTRACT: Sleep is known to support memory consolidation in animals, including humans. Here we ask whether consolidation of novel navigation memory in honeybees depends on sleep. Foragers were exposed to a forced navigation task in which they learned to home more efficiently from an unexpected release site by acquiring navigational memory during the successful homing flight. This task was quantified using harmonic radar tracking and applied to bees that were equipped with a radio frequency identification device (RFID). The RFID was used to record their outbound and inbound flights and continuously monitor their behavior inside the colony, including their rest during the day and sleep at night. Bees marked with the RFID behaved normally inside and outside the hive. Bees slept longer during the night following forced navigation tasks, but foraging flights of different lengths did not lead to different rest times during the day or total sleep time during the night. Sleep deprivation before the forced navigation task did not alter learning and memory acquired during the task. However, sleep deprivation during the night after forced navigation learning reduced the probability of returning successfully to the hive from the same release site. It is concluded that consolidation of novel navigation memory is facilitated by night sleep in bees.

They use fancy technical words to try to distract us from their obviously evil intentions to drive honeybees crazy through sleep-deprivation but, in their defence, instead of blasting Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" for hours and hours on repeat, they simply placed them on a machine that would shake the colony on a regular basis to prevent a restful sleep. So they weren't absolute monsters.