Objective Bees are born with rich olfactory recognition capabilities. Foraging, mating, navigation and social activities all rely on their olfactory system. It is an ideal model for studying behaviors and neural mechanisms of olfactory perception, learning and memory. Bees can distinguish a compound odor as a configural character, and can distinguish the components individually as well, but yet it is not clear whether the feature component of a compound odor is stored into the memory as a key cue in a feature-dependent context.Methods In the feature-positive (FP: AB+, B-) and feature-negative (FN: AB-, B+) olfactory discrimination tasks, we train bees to learn to associate an odor and a sugar reward. During the mid-term memory (3 h) and long-term memory (24 h) tests, response to the trained odors AB and B, and the feature odor A were tested.Results We found that in the FP task, bees can form stable mid-term and long-term memories of the trained odors. The memory of the feature odor was well stored as the rewarded compound. In the FN task, bees were able to distinguish the two trained odors, but their response to the unrewarded compound increased with the passage of time.Conclusion Our results suggest that bees selectively consolidate the reward associated information into long-term memory no matter it is the compound or the components. Interestingly, the feature component is not the key factor to be consolidated into the memory system. Our study indicates that selective memory consolidation is supposed to be an important strategy for simple animals to efficiently encode survival-related information.