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Honeybees’ visual spatial orientation at the feeding site

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Book cover Orientation and Communication in Arthropods

Part of the book series: EXS ((EXS,volume 84))

Summary

Results of behavioural studies on freely flying honeybees (Apis mellifera) are reviewed with the aim of summarizing the various visual spatial parameters by which bees orient to the food source. The results show that the accuracy of the bee’s performance in recognizing the target depends on the magnitude of intensity-, colour-, and motion contrast produced by the target against its background, as well as on the retinal position onto which the stimulus projects at the eye. Mainly, however, the results reveal that bees use a variety of configurational spatial parameters in this task. These include spatial frequency, geometry, symmetry, angular size, absolute size, distance, different types of edges, and orientation of contours. When viewed jointly, the results demonstrate the bees’ remarkable learning capacity and the behavioural flexibility of their orientation performance. They show, in addition, that orientation towards a target does not always require a learning process, i.e., several types of response to the food source are based on hard-wired tendencies. Finally, the results show that colour vision, although not a prerequisite for spatial vision, participates in spatial vision, and that spatial cues extracted from image motion are processed by a colour blind system.

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    M. Lehrer

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  1. Institute of Zoology, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, CH-8057, Zurich, Switzerland

    Miriam Lehrer

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Lehrer, M. (1997). Honeybees’ visual spatial orientation at the feeding site. In: Lehrer, M. (eds) Orientation and Communication in Arthropods. EXS, vol 84. Birkhäuser, Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-8878-3_5

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