Flower-visiting social insects use a variety of cues to help them learn and recall which flowers are high-quality resources, including the flower odour. In addition, some species may learn to respond to the odours left at flowers by other insects, either to avoid flowers that have likely been depleted by recent visitors, or to identify profitable floral patches being used by competitors. For example, Australian stingless bees were observed to be more attracted to food sources recently visited, and thus odour-marked, by other stingless bees or honey bees than food sources with no prior visits. Here, we use a proboscis extension response (PER) protocol to investigate the capacity for olfactory associative learning in the Australian stingless bee, Tetragonula carbonaria. We test the ability of T. carbonaria to learn to associate a food reward with each odour in two paired sets of odours: (1) vanilla vs. lavender, and (2) linalool vs. a synthetic version of the honey bee pheromone Nasonov. After conditioning, T. carbonaria foragers demonstrated successful discrimination between the two different odours in a set, learnt to associate all four test odours with a food reward, and maintained this association for 15 min after training. In all, our results, therefore, show that PER can be used to investigate associative learning in T. carbonaria and support olfactory associative learning as a mechanism by which the odours of both flowers and other bees affect foraging decisions in this species.

访花的群居昆虫利用各种线索来帮助它们学习和回忆哪些花是优质资源，包括花的气味。此外，一些物种可能会学会对其他昆虫在花朵上留下的气味做出反应，要么是为了避免可能被最近的访客耗尽的花朵，要么是​​为了识别竞争对手正在使用的有利可图的花斑。例如，据观察，与之前没有访问过的食物源相比，澳大利亚无刺蜂更容易被其他无刺蜂或蜜蜂最近访问过的、因此带有气味标记的食物源所吸引。在这里，我们使用长鼻延伸反应（PER）协议来研究澳大利亚无刺蜂（ Tetragonula Carbonaria）的嗅觉联想学习能力。我们测试了T.carbonaria学习将食物奖励与两组配对气味中的每种气味联系起来的能力：（1）香草与薰衣草，以及（2）芳樟醇与蜜蜂信息素 Nasonov 的合成版本。经过调节后，T.carbonaria觅食者成功区分了一组中的两种不同气味，学会了将所有四种测试气味与食物奖励联系起来，并在训练后保持这种关联 15 分钟。因此，总而言之，我们的结果表明，PER 可用于研究T.carbonaria的联想学习，并支持嗅觉联想学习作为花朵和其他蜜蜂的气味影响该物种觅食决策的机制。