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

访花者已经进化出了快速可靠地发现食用植物的感官能力。在众多的访花者中，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。颜色可能是蜜蜂检测花朵的最突出的花朵信号：蜜蜂具有色觉，具有较强的学习能力，并且能够比其他方式的线索更有效地将奖励与颜色线索联系起来。此外，天真的蜜蜂有天生的颜色偏好，并使用颜色信号来寻找合适的食用植物的花朵。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。无刺蜂的各种觅食策略的生态多样性是突出的：一些物种在新热带区，古热带区和澳大利亚是优秀的传粉者，一些是比蜜蜂更有效的传粉者为特定的作物植物，其他人是普通的花蜜和花粉小偷的鸟类授粉的花朵，因此，除其他外，蜂鸟或其他花游客的竞争对手。这项初步研究提出了无刺蜜蜂的颜色偏好追求四个主要的调查路线：1。发明了一种配制用于偏好测试的颜色刺激物的新方法，该方法通过混合有色、黑色、灰色和白色粉末状颜料，使得第一次可以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，同时保持其他颜色属性不变。2.测试自由飞行的经验丰富的以及天真的无刺蜜蜂的颜色偏好，从而涵盖了无刺蜜蜂的大部分未开发的生态多样性。3.比较无刺蜂与蜜蜂和熊蜂的颜色偏好，同时关注差异。4.提供证据表明，由于它们的视觉生态，不同的无刺蜂种对作物和温室授粉的潜在益处，以及它们通过鸟类授粉花朵的颜色线索征服感官排斥的潜力。一项初步研究表明，对无刺蜜蜂的研究非常有利，可以获得对无刺蜜蜂颜色视觉复杂主题的意想不到的见解。此外，我们的新方法的建立，以产生目标颜色是合适的，以证明在颜色偏好的无刺蜂的差异。

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.