How Bees See

The ability to do something as simple as finding a flower in a meadow requires that bumblebees overcome one of the most difficult challenges of vision--namely, recognizing different surfaces under different kinds of color illumination.

When all the surfaces in a scene are under the same light, picking out a particular surface when the global illumination changes is relatively simple, since all the vision system needs to do is adapt itself to the scene's average color, kind of like adapting to the darkness of a cinema. More difficult is the ability to recognize the surface or object under multiple lights simultaneously because adapting to the average color doesn't work.

To find out how they accomplish this task with so little processing power--bumblebees only have about a million neurons--researchers at University College London trained bumblebees to find artificial flowers of a particular color using nectar as a reward. They then tested the bee's ability to find the same flower in scenes that were simultaneously illuminated with four different colored lights--UV-yellow, blue, yellow and green.

The researchers discovered that the bees solved the problem in essentially the same way a human would: by using the color relationships between the objects in a scene that were statistically most useful in their past experiences.

The finding was published in the Oct. 31 issue of the journal for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

--Ker Than

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Credit:  University College London