Comparative Psychophysics of Colour Preferences and Colour Learning in Bees with Special Focus on Asian Social Bees

Abstract

Several interesting facets of bee behaviour have fascinated the human mind since historical times. Prominent amongst them is their interaction with flowers, symbolising the mutualistic nature of this relationship. In their search for flowers, bees are known to fly far from a central place—the nest or the hive—and employ multiple sensory systems, in which visual cues, especially colour plays a critical role. A lot of what we know about the visual ecology of bees, comes from just two out of more than 20,000 bee species worldwide—the Western honeybee Apis mellifera and the buff-tailed bumblebee, Bombus terrestris. The tropics abound in bee diversity, yet woefully little is known about the behaviour and sensory ecology of tropical bees. Here, we summarise over a decade of our work on the colour preferences, colour learning and detection thresholds for colour stimuli in tropical Asian honeybees and stingless bee species. More such studies on the sensory ecology of tropical bees are essential to understand how floral traits, of which colour is salient, influences bee–flower interactions and how these interactions shaped the structure of tropical plant–pollinator networks.