All >15,000 species of ants are social and show many variations in individual behavior and colony organization. Is the evolution of the olfactory system in ants linked to sociality? Although ants express the highest numbers of odorant receptors and antennal lobe glomeruli across the insects, recent work claims that specific clusters of glomeruli and related odorant receptor repertoires in ants...
Social insects possess voluminous mushroom bodies (MBs), high-order sensory integration centers for multisensory integration, learning, and memory. In the honeybee Apis mellifera, the MBs receive olfactory input in the MB-calyx lip region. Within the lip, olfactory projection neurons (PNs) form discrete modular synaptic complexes (microglomeruli, MG), mainly with dendritic specializations...
