Abstract
To investigate the process of template renewal in the European honeybee, we collected workers showing nestmate discrimination ability and exposed them to unfamiliar colony environments by keeping them with non-nestmates in a small box or by fostering them in an unrelated colony. Bees exposed to non-nestmates for 25 min showed more tolerance, than bees not exposed, to members of the colony to which they had been exposed, but were still aggressive to bees from other colonies. However, this treatment did not affect their response to nestmates. In the fostering experiment, although fostered bees became significantly more tolerant to bees from the fostering colony after 24 h, their response to former nestmates changed little until 96 h after fostering started. These results suggest that European honeybees change their template rapidly by referring to the inner-colony environment but retain the old template temporally in the early phase of template renewal. This is probably appropriate for accepting nestmates who have not yet acquired the new recognition cue when the colony odor changes.
