brain scans hold key to understanding bee behaviour!

The Natural History Museum researchers and collaborators used the Museum's micro-CT facility to scan the insects' brains in 3D, allowing them to see minute structures that would be damaged if the brains were removed.These structures, in particular the 'mushroom bodies', are thought to help bees remember where to forage for pollen. Given the important role bees play in pollinating crops, understanding how their brains work - and how they may malfunction - is crucial.'It's a fantastic way to look inside insect brains,' says Dr Richard Gill, from Imperial College London, who collaborated on the research. 'We can look at the brain as it naturally sits in the bee's head, without the human error of having to extract it.

Micro-CT scanning uses X-rays to produce thousands of images of an object, which can then be assembled into a 3D model. It works in the same way as CT scanning, which is often done in hospitals, but at a much higher resolution - a bumblebee's brain is just 0.0002% the size of a human brain.

By fine-tuning this process, the research team managed to increase the resolution even further, allowing them to see details just five micrometres across - half the size of a human red blood cell.

This level of detail is important, as the team hopes to investigate the connection between behaviour and brain changes in lab-trained bumblebees. As the bees learn and remember, researchers believe that their brain structures change in size.

'With older techniques, the sizes of these structures could not be accurately measured and compared between bees,' says Dylan Smith, the lead author of the paper and a PhD student at the Museum and Imperial. 'The structures are so small that tiny errors in measurement can lead to wrong conclusions.

'This new technique allows structures to be isolated, examined, and measured in greater detail than ever before.' This will mean that idenfying effects of pesticides such as Neonics easier to quantify and present allowing for better protection for invertebrates.

Fingers are crossed that this technology will be able to be used on other invertebrates to allow for more scientific break throughs!