Institute of Sensory Ecology, Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, 40225, Düsseldorf, Germany.
Sugarbag Bees, West End, QLD, Australia.
J Comp Physiol A Neuroethol Sens Neural Behav Physiol. 2022 Nov;208(5-6):641-652. doi: 10.1007/s00359-022-01581-y. Epub 2022 Oct 21.
Bees play a vital role as pollinators worldwide and have influenced how flower colour signals have evolved. The Western honey bee, Apis mellifera (Apini), and the Buff-tailed bumble bee, Bombus terrestris (Bombini) are well-studied model species with regard to their sensory physiology and pollination capacity, although currently far less is known about stingless bees (Meliponini) that are common in pantropical regions. We conducted comparative experiments with two highly eusocial bee species, the Western honey bee, A. mellifera, and the Australian stingless bee, Tetragonula carbonaria, to understand their colour preferences considering fine-scaled stimuli specifically designed for testing bee colour vision. We employed stimuli made of pigment powders to allow manipulation of single colour parameters including spectral purity (saturation) or colour intensity (brightness) of a blue colour (hue) for which both species have previously shown innate preferences. Both A. mellifera and T. carbonaria demonstrated a significant preference for spectrally purer colour stimuli, although this preference is more pronounced in honey bees than in stingless bees. When all other colour cues were tightly controlled, honey bees receiving absolute conditioning demonstrated a capacity to learn a high-intensity stimulus significant from chance expectation demonstrating some capacity of plasticity for this dimension of colour perception. However, honey bees failed to learn low-intensity stimuli, and T. carbonaria was insensitive to stimulus intensity as a cue. These comparative findings suggest that there may be some common roots underpinning colour perception in bee pollinators and how they interact with flowers, although species-specific differences do exist.
蜜蜂作为全球授粉媒介发挥着至关重要的作用，它们影响了花的颜色信号是如何进化的。西方蜜蜂（Apis mellifera）和熊蜂（Bombus terrestris）在感官生理学和授粉能力方面是研究得很好的模式物种，尽管目前对常见于泛热带地区的无刺蜜蜂（Meliponini）的了解要少得多。我们对两种高度社会性的蜜蜂物种进行了比较实验，即西方蜜蜂（Apis mellifera）和澳大利亚无刺蜜蜂（Tetragonula carbonaria），以了解它们对精细刺激的颜色偏好，这些刺激是专门为测试蜜蜂的颜色视觉而设计的。我们使用色素粉末制成的刺激物，以操纵单一颜色参数，包括蓝色（色调）的光谱纯度（饱和度）或颜色强度（亮度），这两种物种之前都表现出了对这些颜色的先天偏好。西方蜜蜂（Apis mellifera）和澳大利亚无刺蜜蜂（Tetragonula carbonaria）都表现出对光谱更纯的颜色刺激的显著偏好，尽管蜜蜂对颜色的这种偏好比无刺蜜蜂更为明显。当所有其他颜色线索都被严格控制时，接受绝对条件反射的蜜蜂能够学习到高强度的刺激，这与随机预期有显著差异，这表明蜜蜂在颜色感知的这个维度上具有一定的可塑性。然而，蜜蜂无法学习低强度的刺激，而澳大利亚无刺蜜蜂（Tetragonula carbonaria）对刺激强度作为线索不敏感。这些比较性的发现表明，在蜜蜂授粉媒介的颜色感知及其与花朵的相互作用方面，可能存在一些共同的基础，尽管确实存在物种特异性差异。
