HONEYBEE'S USE OF SPATIAL PARAMETERS FOR FLOWER DISCRIMINATION

ABSTRACT Early as well as recent behavioral studies on the bee's use of spatial cues for recognizing the food source are reviewed. The spatial parameters considered are those that natural flowers display, e.g., contrast, spatial frequency, geometry, symmetry, size, depth, edges, orientation of contours, and position in the visual field. It is concluded that bees use each of these parameters for learning and recognizing the food source. Intensity contrast as well as color contrast are involved in spatial vision. However, spatial cues extracted from image motion are processed by a color-blind system. Although the results reviewed here have been obtained using artificial food sources, it is argued that the spatial parameters under consideration are actually used by the bee for discriminating among natural flowers.

[1]  Alun M. Anderson.  Parameters determining the attractiveness of stripe patterns in the honey bee , 1977, Animal Behaviour.

[2]  R. Menzel,et al.  Color Vision Honey Bees: Phenomena and Physiological Mechanisms , 1989 .

[3]  M. Srinivasan.  Pattern recognition in the honeybee: Recent progress , 1994 .

[4]  Zhang,et al.  Honeybee navigation en route to the goal: visual flight control and odometry , 1996, The Journal of experimental biology.

[5]  G. J. Faulkner,et al.  Honeybee Behaviour as Affected by Plant Height and Flower Colour in Brussels Sprouts , 1976 .

[6]  B. Schnetter,et al.  Experiments on Pattern Discrimination in Honey Bees , 1972 .

[7]  I. Flatt,et al.  Notizen: Visual Fixation in Freely Flying Bees , 1977 .

[8]  George Adrian Horridge,et al.  Shape vision in bees: innate preference for flower-like patterns , 1995 .

[9]  DH Hubel,et al.  Psychophysical evidence for separate channels for the perception of form, color, movement, and depth , 1987, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[10]  R. Wehner.  Pattern Modulation and Pattern Detection in the Visual System of Hymenoptera , 1972 .

[11]  E. E. Leppik.  The Ability of Insects to Distinguish Number , 1953, The American Naturalist.

[12]  Mandyam V. Srinivasan,et al.  Active vision in honeybees: Task-oriented suppression of an innate behaviour , 1994, Vision Research.

[13]  B. A. Cartwright,et al.  Short Communications: How Honey-Bees Know their Distance from a Near-By Visual Landmark , 1979 .

[14]  M. Srinivasan,et al.  Motion cues provide the bee's visual world with a third dimension , 1988, Nature.

[15]  R. Menzel,et al.  Das Gedchtnis der Honigbiene fr Spektralfarben@@@On the honey bee's memory of spectral colours: II. Umlernen und Mehrfachlernen@@@II. Reversal learning and learning of several colours , 1969 .

[16]  J. Free.  Effect of Flower Shapes and Nectar Guides On the Behaviour of Foraging Honeybees , 1970 .

[17]  D. Levin,et al.  POLLINATOR FLIGHT DIRECTIONALITY AND ITS EFFECT ON POLLEN FLOW , 1971, Evolution; international journal of organic evolution.

[18]  C. Gross,et al.  Floral traits and pollinator constancy: Foraging by native bees among three sympatric legumes , 1992 .

[19]  George Adrian Horridge,et al.  Bees can combine range and visual angle to estimate absolute size , 1992 .

[20]  Mandyam V. Srinivasan,et al.  Pattern recognition in honeybees: local and global analysis , 1992, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences.

[21]  Mandyam V. Srinivasan,et al.  Visual edge detection in the honeybee and its chromatic properties , 1990, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. B. Biological Sciences.

[22]  S Rossel,et al.  Vertical disparity and binocular vision in the praying mantis. , 1992, Visual neuroscience.

[23]  M. V. Srinivasan.  Shouldn't directional movement detection necessarily be “colour-blind”? , 1985, Vision Research.

[24]  M. Srinivasan,et al.  Visual Discrimination of Pattern Orientation by Honeybees: Performance and Implications for `Cortical' Processing , 1994 .

[25]  E. Wolf,et al.  THE EFFECT OF LIGHT INTENSITY, AREA, AND FLICKER FREQUENCY ON THE VISUAL REACTIONS OF THE HONEY BEE , 1935, The Journal of general physiology.

[26]  N. Waser.  Flower Constancy: Definition, Cause, and Measurement , 1986, The American Naturalist.