Abstract
Social isolation may affect one’s vulnerability to become addicted to caffeine, a common stimulant taken daily, and may lead to a caffeine substance use disorder (Meredith et. al., 2013). The honey bee (Apis mellifera) was used as a model system to test for caffeine addiction between isolated and grouped bees because their learning can be quantified. It’s hypothesized that socially isolated bees will learn the caffeine reward better than the grouped bees because social isolation may cause an organism to be more prone to caffeine addiction and caffeine enhances a bee’s memory (Whitaker, Degoulet & Morikawa, 2013; Wright et al., 2013). Bees were socially isolated or grouped for 0, 1, 2, or 4 days and underwent massed trials with odors paired with a sucrose or caffeine reward. The proboscis extension reflex (PER) responses were recorded based on a binary system. The hypothesis was partially supported. The isolated bees learned better overall than the grouped bees possibly due to stress-induced learning, in which the memory of the odor and reward was enhanced by the stressful isolation (Vogel & Schwabe, 2016). However, no significance was found between learning and the caffeine reward, possibly due to an insufficient amount of caffeine. Future
studies can focus on addiction and stressed induced learning.