Bee Learning and Communication - Color Learning in Honeybees

Color Learning in Honeybees

One of the most common ways that honey bees, Apis mellifera, demonstrate associative learning is in the context of color recognition and discrimination tasks. Just as vertebrate species such as mice or pigeons that can be trained to perform associative learning tasks, honey bees make excellent subjects for tasks involving discrimination and color memory. Beginning in the early 1900s, scientists Karl von Frisch and later Randolf Menzel began asking questions about the existence, learning rates, memory, and timing of color vision in bees.