36 years ago, 1973, Karl von Frisch received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine (together with Konrad Lorenz and Nicolaas Tinbergen) for his discovery of the dance language in honeybees. 22 years ago, Randolf Menzel & Alison Mercer edited “Neurobiology and Behavior of Honeybees” (Springer, 1987), a fundamental book for the study of invertebrate biology which covered most aspects of honeybee biology, focusing on behavioral and neurobiological approaches. Three years ago, the honeybee genome was published. Recently, new doppler-radar based approaches have allowed studying detailed flight tracks of honeybees, and directly test how dance-information is transformed into flight behavior. Clearly, honeybee research has made spectacular progresses in the last 50 years, and the honeybee has consolidated its status as a model system due to significant discoveries from many research groups around the world. Most importantly, the honeybee has a very rich behavioral repertoire, both at the level of the individual animal and as a social organism, and a readily accessible nervous system, a combination that explains its attractiveness as a model system for neuroscience and behavior. The recent expansion of genomic research opens many new doors to integrate these aspects.pWe would like to capture this moment to discuss where to honeybee neuroscience is heading in the next 10, 20 and even 50 years. To this end, we had invited the leading representatives in honeybee research to a symposium, that was held in Berlin June 10-13, 2010.
