Color Learning Rates and Preferences
After von Frisch’s initial studies, the German scientist Randolf Menzel continued the study of color vision in honey bees and performed more detailed tests. He was curious about which colors honey bees would be able to learn fastest and whether or not bees had a greater aptitude for learning certain colors.
He used lights of varying color and intensity to illuminate circles of light on a solid surface. This set up was similar to the pieces of colored cardboard employed by von Frisch, but by using light instead of cardboard, Menzel was able to change the intensity and color of light easily. He could simply adjust the projection of the light to create a wide variety of different experimental set-ups.
To test the intricacies of the bee color vision von Frisch had established, Menzel performed an experiment that aimed to test bees ability to distinguish between two different colors. To do this, Menzel used a projected circle of colored light surrounding a small dish that could hold a sugar-water reward. Menzel then projected a second circle of differently colored light surrounding a second dish some distance away from the first. Next, a single bee was placed equidistant between these two different lights and allowed to choose which dish to search for a sugar-water treat. Only one of the colored light circles surrounded a dish that contained sugar-water; the other was empty. Menzel was then able to measure how quickly the bees learned to preferentially search only the rewarded light and to ignore the dish surrounded by unrewarded light.
The results of the experiment showed that bees did not learn to discriminate between all color pairs equally well. The fastest rate of learning was when violet light was rewarded. The color that the bees had the most difficulty learning was green, and all other colors fell somewhere in between. This evidence of inherent bias is evolutionarily reasonable given that color vision in bees allows them to distinguish between different nectar-bearing flowers, much like the rewarded dishes. As more flowers are purple than green it makes sense that bees would be more sensitive to colors likely to result in nourishment.
Read more about this topic: Bee Learning And Communication
Famous quotes containing the words color, learning, rates and/or preferences:
“For the profit of travel: in the first place, you get rid of a few prejudices.... The prejudiced against color finds several hundred millions of people of all shades of color, and all degrees of intellect, rank, and social worth, generals, judges, priests, and kings, and learns to give up his foolish prejudice.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“It is no small mischief to a boy, that many of the best years of his life should be devoted to the learning of what can never be of any real use to any human being. His mind is necessarily rendered frivolous and superficial by the long habit of attaching importance to words instead of things; to sound instead of sense.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)
“[The] elderly and timid single gentleman in Paris ... never drove down the Champs Elysees without expecting an accident, and commonly witnessing one; or found himself in the neighborhood of an official without calculating the chances of a bomb. So long as the rates of progress held good, these bombs would double in force and number every ten years.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“This is the great truth life has to teach us ... that gratification of our individual desires and expression of our personal preferences without consideration for their effect upon others brings in the end nothing but ruin and devastation.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)