Taste perception in honeybees: just a taste of honey?

The advent of the genomic era has opened new doors to understand the fundamental organization of living organisms and has therefore promoted a fertile field of comparative research that intends to identify similarities and differences between related and unrelated species at the genomic level. One of the organisms whose genome has been recently decoded is that of the honeybee Apis mellifera, enabling a direct comparison with another well-studied insect, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. It was reported that the honeybee has only ten gustatory receptors and thus a very poor taste perception compared to Drosophila, which presents 68 gustatory receptors, and the mosquito Anopheles gambiae, which presents 76 gustatory receptors. In this forum article, we discuss the implications of these findings taking into account previous and new discoveries on honeybee gustation based on behavioral and neurobiological studies by several authors and us. We conclude that the world of taste of a honeybee might not be as poor as proposed and that further studies should integrate molecular, neurobiological, behavioral and ecological approaches to better characterize taste perception in bees.