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First published online December 2, 2005
Journal of Experimental Biology 208, 4709-4714 (2005)
Published by The Company of Biologists 2005
doi: 10.1242/jeb.01929

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Honeybee (Apis mellifera) vision can discriminate between and recognise images of human faces

Adrian G. Dyer^1,2,*, Christa Neumeyer¹ and Lars Chittka³

¹ Institut fur Zoologie III (Neurobiologie), Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Mainz, 55099, Germany,
² Clinical Vision Sciences, La Trobe University, Victoria 3086, Australia
³ School of Biological Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London, London, E1 4NS, UK

View larger version (60K): [in a new window]   Fig. 1 (A) Foraging set up for honeybees. (B) Bee looking at a target face. (C) The ability of bees to discriminate between images of human faces. The upper region shows task (target top and distracter bottom), and the column immediately below shows mean percentage of correct choices for five bees in non-rewarded tests (±1 S.E.M.). Bees were trained to the face at the top of column i versus a schematic face distracter, then to recognise the target face from the distracter in column ii. Bees then recognised the target face from novel distracters (columns iii, iv) but failed to discriminate faces rotated by 180° (column v). Pooled choices for non-rewarded tests in the respective conditions (i=166, ii=246, iii=199, iv=196, v=141).

View larger version (11K): [in a new window]   Fig. 2. Acquisition for five bees (± S.E.M.) learning to discriminate a target face from the distractor face stimulus shown in Fig. 1C column ii.