Research: Bee vision

15 November 2005

Bees' colour vision is more sophisticated than previously thought.

Like humans, bees are sensitive to light at three different wavelengths (trichromatic). Also like humans, they can recognise the colour of objects such as flowers even when their illumination changes (so-called colour constancy).

Experimentally, this has been observed by training bees to recognise a particular coloured flower on a uniformly coloured background under different lighting conditions. But real life is very different – how does a bee cope with a more complex scene, such as the dappled lighting of a woodland glade?

Dr Beau Lotto and Dr Martina Wicklein at the Institute of Ophthalmology have shown that bees can identify a particular flower among a grid of 64 flowers, each on a black background, even when they are illuminated in different ways. Thus bees' colour constancy abilities seem to hold even in more complex situations.

As well as shedding light on how bees cope with changing illumination, the research could also impact on the development of robotic visual systems.

External links

Lotto RB, Wicklein M. Bees encode behaviorally significant spectral relationships in complex scenes to resolve stimulus ambiguity. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2005;102(46):16870–4.