Colour is more than hue preferences for compiled

Authors: Sebastian Koethe Jessica Bossems Adrian G Dyer Klaus Lunau

Publish Date: 2016/08/01

Volume: 202, Issue: 9-10, Pages: 615-627

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Abstract

The colour vision of bees has been extensively analysed in honeybees and bumblebees but few studies consider the visual perception of stingless bees Meliponini In a fivestage experiment the preference for colour intensity and purity and the preference for the dominant wavelength were tested by presenting four colour stimuli in each test to freely flying experienced workers of two stingless bee species Melipona mondury and Melipona quadrifasciata The results with beeblue beeUVblue and beegreen colours offered in four combinations of varying colour intensity and purity suggest a complex interaction between these colour traits for the determination of colour choice Specifically M mondury preferred beeUVblue colours over beegreen beeblue and beebluegreen colours while M quadrifasciata preferred beegreen colour stimuli Moreover in M mondury the preferences were different if the background colour was changed from grey to green There was a significant difference between species where M mondury preferred UVreflecting over UVabsorbing beebluegreen colour stimuli whereas M quadrifasciata showed an opposite preference The different colour preferences of the free flying bees in identical conditions may be caused by the bees’ experience with natural flowers precedent to the choice tests suggesting reward partitioning between speciesWe thank Gabriel AR Melo from the Universidade Federal do Paraná Curitiba Brazil and Laércio P AmaralNeto from the Universidade Federal do Paraná Curitiba Brazil for supplying native stingless bee hives and providing support during our experiments Furthermore JB thanks the HeinrichHeineUniversity Düsseldorf Germany for funding her trip to Curitiba Brazil by granting a WoltersVollhardt scholarship SK and KL thank the DFG Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for funding AGD is grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt foundation for facilitating collaborative research At last we would like to thank Stefan Jarau from the University of Ulm Germany Miguel A RodríguezGironés from the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid Spain and an anonymous reviewer for critical and helpful discussion

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