![]() However, due to the scarcity of comparative data, the relationship between brain neuro-architecture and behavioural variance remains unclear. ![]() This makes bees an ideal model for understanding insect cognitive functions and the neural mechanisms that underlie them. In social bees this variability is key to the division of labour that maintains their complex social organizations and has been linked to the maturation of specific brain areas as a result of development and foraging experience. Ultimately, this will help address fundamental unresolved questions related to the evolution of animal brains and cognition.īees, despite their small brains, possess a rich behavioural repertoire and show significant variations among individuals. Our fast, robust and user-friendly approach holds considerable promises for carrying out large-scale quantitative neuroanatomical comparisons across a wider range of animals. In addition, the bumblebee dataset showed a significant level of lateralization in optic and antennal lobes, providing a potential explanation for reported variations in visual and olfactory learning. We revealed strong inter-individual variations in total brain size that are consistent across colonies and species, and may underpin behavioural variability central to complex social organisations. Here we used micro-CT imaging and deep learning to perform automated analyses of 3D image data from 187 honey bee and bumblebee brains. So far, however, such analyses have required extensive manual effort, which considerably limits the scope for comparative research. Analysing large numbers of brain samples can reveal minor, but statistically and biologically relevant variations in brain morphology that provide critical insights into animal behaviour, ecology and evolution.
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