Colour preferences in stingless bees - features of an outstanding visual ecology

无刺蜜蜂的颜色偏好——杰出视觉生态的特征

• 批准号: 286748826
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Klaus Lunau
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: RMIT University
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2014-12-31 至 2018-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/286748826?language=en
• 关键词: Colour; preferences; stingless; bees; features

Flower visitors have evolved sensorial capabilities to discover food plants rapidly and reliably. Among the manifold flower visitors bees play an outstanding role as pollinators of natural flowers and of crops as well as in pollination management systems. Colour is probably the most prominent flower signal for bees to detect flowers: bees possess colour vision, have strong learning skills and are able to associate reward with colour cues more efficiently than with cues of other modalities. Moreover, naïve bees have innate colour preferences and use colour signals in order to find flowers of suitable food plants. Most studies of bee colour vision and colour preferences were focused on honeybees and bumblebees. The ecological diversity in regard to various foraging strategies in stingless bees is outstanding: some species are excellent pollinators in the Neotropics, Paleotropics and Australis, some are more effective pollinators than honeybees for specific crop plants, others are ordinary nectar and pollen thieves of bird-pollinated flowers and thus, inter alia, competitors of hummingbirds or other flower visitors. This proposed initial study of colour preferences in stingless bees pursues four major lines of investigation: 1. Invention of a new method confecting colour stimuli for preference tests by mixing coloured, black, grey, and white powdered pigments so that for the first time one single colour attribute, i.e. colour intensity, colour purity or peak wavelength, can be varied while holding the other colour attributes constant. 2. Testing colour preferences of freely flying experienced as well as of naïve stingless bees and thereby covering the largely unexplored ecological diversity of stingless bees. 3. Comparing the colour preferences of stingless bees with those of honeybees and bumblebees while focusing on differences. 4. Providing evidence for the prospective benefit of distinct stingless bee species for crop and greenhouse pollination due to their visual ecology, and for their potential to conquer the sensory exclusion via colour cues of bird-pollinated flowers. A pilot study has shown that the work with stingless bees is highly auspicious to obtain unexpected insights into the complex theme of colour vision in stingless bees. Moreover the establishment of our new method to produce target colours is suitable to demonstrate differences in the colour preferences of stingless bees.

花卉访客已经进化出感官能力，能够快速而可靠地发现食用植物。在众多的访花昆虫中，蜜蜂作为天然花卉和农作物的传粉者以及在授粉管理系统中发挥着突出的作用。颜色可能是蜜蜂识别花朵的最突出的花卉信号：蜜蜂拥有颜色视觉，拥有强大的学习技能，能够比其他形式的线索更有效地将奖励与颜色线索联系起来。此外，天真的蜜蜂有与生俱来的颜色偏好，并使用颜色信号来寻找合适的食用植物的花。大多数关于蜜蜂颜色视觉和颜色偏好的研究都集中在蜜蜂和大黄蜂身上。无刺蜜蜂在各种觅食策略方面的生态多样性是突出的：一些物种是新热带、古热带和南方的优秀传粉者，对于特定的农作物，一些物种比蜜蜂更有效地传粉，其他物种则是普通的鸟类授粉花的花蜜和花粉窃贼，因此，除其他外，是蜂鸟或其他花卉访客的竞争对手。这项关于无刺蜜蜂颜色偏好的初步研究主要有四条主线：1.发明了一种新的方法，通过混合彩色、黑色、灰色和白色粉末颜料来配制偏好测试的颜色刺激，从而首次可以在保持其他颜色属性不变的情况下改变一种单一的颜色属性，即颜色强度、颜色纯度或峰值波长。2.测试自由飞行的经验蜜蜂和幼稚的无刺蜜蜂的颜色偏好，从而涵盖基本上未被探索的无刺蜜蜂的生态多样性。3.比较无刺蜜蜂与蜜蜂和大黄蜂的颜色偏好，同时关注差异。4.提供了证据，证明了独特的无刺蜜蜂物种由于其视觉生态而对作物和温室授粉具有潜在的益处，以及它们通过鸟类授粉的花朵的颜色线索克服感觉排斥的潜力。一项初步研究表明，对无刺蜜蜂的研究非常幸运，可以对无刺蜜蜂颜色视觉的复杂主题获得意想不到的见解。此外，我们建立的产生目标颜色的新方法适合于显示无刺蜜蜂的颜色偏好的差异。

项目成果

Innate colour preferences of the Australian native stingless bee Tetragonula carbonaria Sm.

• DOI: 10.1007/s00359-016-1101-4
• 发表时间: 2016-10-01
• 期刊: JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE PHYSIOLOGY A-NEUROETHOLOGY SENSORY NEURAL AND BEHAVIORAL PHYSIOLOGY
• 影响因子: 2.1
• 作者: Dyer, Adrian G.;Boyd-Gerny, Skye;Wong, Bob B. M.
• 通讯作者: Wong, Bob B. M.