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First published online March 2, 2006
Journal of Experimental Biology 209, 987-993 (2006)
Published by The Company of Biologists 2006
doi: 10.1242/jeb.02124
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Do honeybees detect colour targets using serial or parallel visual search?

Johannes Spaethe*, Jürgen Tautz and Lars Chittka{dagger}

Beegroup, Biozentrum, Department of Behavioral Physiology and Sociobiology, University of Würzburg, Germany


Figure 1
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  		Fig. 1. Experimental setup. (A) Overview of the decision box. The shaded area indicates the subtended visual angle of the back wall for a bee at the box entrance. (B) Frontal view of the back wall (0.43x0.43 m) as it is seen from the entrance hole. Yellow object, target; blue objects, distractors; dotted line, grid.

 

Figure 2
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  		Fig. 2. (A) Spectral reflection curves of the background and stimuli measured between 300 nm and 700 nm by means of an Ocean Optics S2000 spectrometer. (B) Loci of all used colour stimuli plotted in the colour hexagon. Distance between two loci is a measure of the bee-subjective similarity of colours. For calculation and values, see Table 1 and Appendix.

 

Figure 3
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  		Fig. 3. (A) Decision time and (B) error rate plotted against distractor number. Both search time and error rate increased with increasing distractor number for all three target/distractor combinations. Number of tested bees is five for the blue target/yellow distractor combination and six for the others. Values are means ± s.e.m.

 

Figure 4
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  		Fig. 4. (A) Decision time and (B) error rate plotted against target number. Both search time and error rate decreased with increasing target number. However, decrease of search time with target number was found to narrowly miss significance at the 5% level. Values are means ± s.e.m. (N=6).

 




© The Company of Biologists Ltd 2006