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Abstract Honey bees are important organisms for research in many fields, including physiology, behavior, and ecology. Honey bee colonies are relatively easy and affordable to procure, manage, and replace. However, some difficulties still exist in honey bee research, specifically that honey bee colonies have a distinct seasonality, especially in temperate regions. Honey bee colonies transition from a large society in which workers have a strict temporal division of labor in the summer, to a group of behaviorally flexible workers who manage the colony over winter. Furthermore, opening colonies or collecting bees when they are outside has the potential to harm the colony because of the disruption in thermoregulation. Here, we present a simple and affordable indoor management method utilizing a mylar tent and controlled environmental conditions that allows bees to freely fly without access to outdoor space. This technique permits research labs to successfully keep several colonies persistently active during winter at higher latitudes. Having an extended research period is particularly important for training students, allowing preliminary experiments to be performed, and developing methods. However, we find distinct behavioral differences in honey bees managed in this situation. Specifically learning and thermoregulatory behaviors were diminished in the bees managed in the tent. Therefore, we recommend caution in utilizing these winter bees for full experiments until more is known. Overall, this method expands the research potential on honey bees, and calls attention to the additional research that is needed to understand how indoor management might affect honey bees. 

Animals are constantly bombarded with stimuli, which presents a fundamental problem of sorting among pervasive uninformative stimuli and novel, possibly meaningful stimuli. We evaluated novelty detection behaviorally in honey bees as they position their antennae differentially in an air stream carrying familiar or novel odors. We then characterized neuronal responses to familiar and novel odors in the first synaptic integration center in the brain–the antennal lobes. We found that the neurons that exhibited stronger initial responses to the odor that was to be familiarized are the same units that later distinguish familiar and novel odors, independently of chemical identities. These units, including both tentative projection neurons and local neurons, showed a decreased response to the familiar odor but an increased response to the novel odor. Our results suggest that the antennal lobe may represent familiarity or novelty to an odor stimulus in addition to its chemical identity code. Therefore, the mechanisms for novelty detection may be present in early sensory processing, either as a result of local synaptic interaction or via feedback from higher brain centers.