Division of Biological Sciences, Section of Ecology, Behavior, & Evolution, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA.
Insect Sci. 2020 Apr;27(2):349-360. doi: 10.1111/1744-7917.12651. Epub 2018 Dec 18.
Animals use diverse sensory stimuli to navigate their environment and to recognize rewarding food sources. Honey bees use visual attributes of the targeted food source, such as its color, shape, size, direction and distance from the hive, and the landmarks around it to navigate during foraging. They transmit the location information of the food source to other bees if it is highly rewarding. To investigate the relative importance of these attributes, we trained bees to feeders in two different experiments. In the first experiment, we asked whether bees prefer to land on (a) a similar feeder at a different distance on the same heading or on (b) a visually distinct feeder located at the exact same location. We found that, within a short foraging range, bees relied heavily on the color and the shape of the food source and to a lesser extent on its distance from the hive. In the second experiment, we asked if moving the main landmark or the feeder (visual target) influenced recruitment dancing for the feeder. We found that foragers took longer to land and danced fewer circuits when the location of the food source, or a major landmark associated with it, changed. These results demonstrate that prominent visual attributes of food sources and landmarks are evidently more reliable than distance information and that foraging bees heavily utilize these visual cues at the later stages of their journey.
动物利用各种感官刺激来导航环境并识别有奖励的食物来源。蜜蜂在觅食过程中利用目标食物源的视觉属性，例如其颜色、形状、大小、方向和与蜂巢的距离，以及周围的地标来导航。如果食物源有很高的奖励，它们会将食物源的位置信息传递给其他蜜蜂。为了研究这些属性的相对重要性，我们在两个不同的实验中训练蜜蜂到喂食器。在第一个实验中，我们询问蜜蜂是否更喜欢降落在（a）同一方向上不同距离的相似喂食器上，还是降落在（b）位于相同位置的视觉上不同的喂食器上。我们发现，在短距离觅食范围内，蜜蜂高度依赖食物源的颜色和形状，其次是距离蜂巢的距离。在第二个实验中，我们询问是否移动主要地标或喂食器（视觉目标）会影响对喂食器的招募舞蹈。我们发现，当食物源的位置或与其相关的主要地标发生变化时，觅食者降落所需的时间更长，跳舞的圈数也更少。这些结果表明，食物源和地标明显的视觉属性显然比距离信息更可靠，并且觅食蜜蜂在其旅程的后期会大量利用这些视觉线索。
