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Project Description
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Honeybees use a special symbol communication, the waggle dance, for sharing
information in the colony about the remote food source. Karl von Frisch (Nobel
Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1973) called this communication a "dance
language", as it communicates the vector information to the food source to hive
mates (:ref:`Fig. 1 <fig_dancing_language>`).

.. _fig_dancing_language:

.. figure:: _static/dancing_language.png
   :align: center
   :scale: 100% 

   **Figure 1:** *Dancing language*

Distance and direction information is encoded in the duration and direction of
air vibration caused by the bee's wingbeat, which consists of vibration pulses
with a highly specific temporal pattern. The vibratory signals are detected and
processed in the auditory pathway of the bee, starting with Johnston's organ
(JO) located at the second segment (pedicel) of the antenna (:ref:`Fig. 2
<fig_johnstons_organ>`).

.. _fig_johnstons_organ:

.. figure:: _static/johnstons_organ.png
   :align: center
   :scale: 30%

   **Figure 2:** *Johnston's organ*

We study the circuitry of auditory processing of communication signals using a
combined experimental and computational approach. We obtain detailed
morphological data of identified neurons in the auditory system of honeybees
and use compartmental modeling to investigate the signal processing properties
based on these data. Here we focus on a vibration-sensitive interneuron,
DL-Int-1, located in the primary auditory center (:ref:`Fig. 3
<fig_dl_int_1>`). This neuron receives input from JO and responds in a specific
way to the vibration pulses of waggle-dance communication signals (Ai et al
2009).

.. _fig_dl_int_1:

.. figure:: _static/dl_int_1.png
   :align: center
   :scale: 100%


   **Figure 3:** *DL-Int-1 (green ) and JO afferents (red)*


**Literature**

* Hiroyuki Ai, Jürgen Rybak, Randolf Menzel, and Tsunao Itoh, *Response
  Characteristics of Vibration-Sensitive Interneurons Related to Johnston’s
  Organ in the Honeybee, Apis mellifera*, The Journal of Comparative Neurology
  515:145–160, 2009.
* Minemoto T, Saitoh A, Ikeno H, Isokawa T, Kamiura N, Matsui N, Kanzaki R
  (2009) SIGEN: *System for Reconstructing Three-Dimensional Structure of
  Insect Neurons*, Proc. Asia Sim. Conf., JSST2009. 
* Hiroyuki Ai, Stephan Haupt, Philipp Rautenberg, Michael Stransky, Thomas
  Wachtler and Hidetoshi Ikeno, *Robust automated protocol for extraction and
  comparison of single neuron morphology*,  INCF Conference Neuroinformatics
  2012, 2012/09/10
* Michael
  Stransky, Philipp L. Rautenberg, Stephan S. Haupt, Hidetoshi Ikeno, Hiroyuki
  Ai, and Thomas Wachtler, *Morphological properties of neurons in the honeybee
  auditory system*, Bernstein Conference 2012, 2012/09/13