Skip to main content
ARS Home » Pacific West Area » Wapato, Washington » Temperate Tree Fruit and Vegetable Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #350752
Research Project: New Technologies and Strategies to Manage the Changing Pest Complex on Temperate Fruit Trees

Location: Temperate Tree Fruit and Vegetable Research

Title: Associative learning of food odors by the European paper wasp, Polistes dominula Christ (Hymenoptera: Vespidae)

Author
item LANDOLT, PETER - Former ARS Employee
item ELMQUIST, DANE - Washington State University

Submitted to: Environmental Entomology
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 5/14/2018
Publication Date: 6/9/2018
Citation: Landolt, P., Elmquist, D. 2018. Associative learning of food odors by the European paper wasp, Polistes dominula Christ (Hymenoptera: Vespidae) . Environmental Entomology. 47: 960-968.

Interpretive Summary: Social wasps are a problem for fruit growers when they directly damage ripe fruit, and when they constitute a stinging hazard to people and animals. Researchers at the USDA-ARS Laboratory in Wapato, WA, and the Department of Entomology, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, are developing chemical attractants based on fermented sweet foods to reduce wasp numbers in these pest situations. They determined that European paper wasps are more strongly attracted to the odor of a food following an experience with that food, and more strongly attracted to a chemical following experience with that chemical in a sugar solution as food. This change in behavior is interpreted to be associative learning. These new findings explain previously observed poor attraction of these wasps to food attractants, and suggest that better trapping of wasps might be attained following field exposure of wasps to a lure chemical in a food.

Technical Abstract: We investigated associative learning of food odors by the European paper wasp Polistes dominula Christ because of consistently low rates of attraction to food materials in laboratory assays. We hypothesized that wasps in nature exhibit non-specific food-finding behavior until locating a suitable food, and then respond more strongly and specifically to odors associated with that food reward. Female P. dominula workers exhibited higher rates of attraction in a flight tunnel to piped odors of fermented fruit purees following previous experience with that puree, compared to wasps with no prior experience with the fermented fruits. Attraction behavior included upwind oriented flight and casting within the odor plume, indicative of chemoanemotaxis. Similar increases in attraction responses occurred following feeding experience with a sugar solution that included either 3-methyl-1-butanol or pear ester, but not eugenol. These experimental results support the hypothesis of associative learning of food odors in P. dominula. We discuss the ecological relevance of our results and suggest an alternative approach to trapping paper wasps in pest situations utilizing learned chemical attractants.