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Colour is more than hue: preferences for compiled colour traits in the stingless bees Melipona mondury and M. quadrifasciata

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Abstract

The colour vision of bees has been extensively analysed in honeybees and bumblebees, but few studies consider the visual perception of stingless bees (Meliponini). In a five-stage experiment the preference for colour intensity and purity, and the preference for the dominant wavelength were tested by presenting four colour stimuli in each test to freely flying experienced workers of two stingless bee species, Melipona mondury and Melipona quadrifasciata. The results with bee-blue, bee-UV-blue and bee-green colours offered in four combinations of varying colour intensity and purity suggest a complex interaction between these colour traits for the determination of colour choice. Specifically, M. mondury preferred bee-UV-blue colours over bee-green, bee-blue and bee-blue-green colours while M. quadrifasciata preferred bee-green colour stimuli. Moreover in M. mondury the preferences were different if the background colour was changed from grey to green. There was a significant difference between species where M. mondury preferred UV-reflecting over UV-absorbing bee-blue-green colour stimuli, whereas M. quadrifasciata showed an opposite preference. The different colour preferences of the free flying bees in identical conditions may be caused by the bees’ experience with natural flowers precedent to the choice tests, suggesting reward partitioning between species.

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Ackno wledgments

We thank Gabriel AR Melo from the Universidade Federal do Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil and Laércio P Amaral-Neto from the Universidade Federal do Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil for supplying native stingless bee hives and providing support during our experiments. Furthermore, JB thanks the Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf, Germany for funding her trip to Curitiba, Brazil by granting a Wolters-Vollhardt scholarship. SK and KL thank the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) for funding. AGD is grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt foundation for facilitating collaborative research. At last, we would like to thank Stefan Jarau from the University of Ulm, Germany; Miguel A Rodríguez-Gironés from the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid, Spain; and an anonymous reviewer for critical and helpful discussion.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Sensory Ecology, Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, 40225, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Sebastian Koethe, Jessica Bossems & Klaus Lunau

  2. School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, 3000, Australia

    Adrian G. Dyer

  3. Department of Physiology, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, 3800, Australia

    Adrian G. Dyer

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  1. Sebastian Koethe
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  2. Jessica Bossems
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Correspondence to Klaus Lunau.

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359_2016_1115_MOESM1_ESM.tif

Colour loci of the test stimuli of stage I-IV with green background in the colour hexagon (Chittka 1992) with calculated values of the receptor-specific contrast, chromatic contrast, spectral purity and green contrast. (TIFF 8382 kb)

359_2016_1115_MOESM2_ESM.tif

Colour preferences of Melipona mondury tested with colour stimuli presented against green background. The colour choices of the tested bees (n = 20) are plotted against the tested stimuli for every test stage. Workers were tested for bee-blue (stage I), bee-UV-blue (stage II), bee-green (stage III), and bee-blue-green (stage IV) colours. Subsequently the workers were tested for the most preferred colour hue (stage V). Each stage comprised four colours of the same dominant wavelength which varied in colour intensity and colour purity to test the impact of these two colour traits on the bees’ colour choice. I = colour intensity, P = colour purity; * = low, ** = medium, *** = high; UV- = ultraviolet-absorbing; UV + = ultraviolet-reflecting. Different letters indicate significant differences, n.s. = not significant (Tukey all-pair comparisons) (TIFF 36732 kb)

359_2016_1115_MOESM3_ESM.tif

Weighted colour preferences of individual bees of M. mondury (black bars) and M. quadrifasciata (shaded bars) for the five tested stages. The mean choice frequency of each individual bee were weighted with the most frequently visited stimulus scored 1 and the other three stimuli scored 0. I = colour intensity, P = colour purity; * = low, ** = medium, *** = high; UV- = ultraviolet-absorbing; UV + = ultraviolet-reflecting; the symbols above the columns represent the statistical analysis by Fisher’s exact test: *** = p < 0.001, ** = p < 0.01 (TIFF 29870 kb)

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Koethe, S., Bossems, J., Dyer, A.G. et al. Colour is more than hue: preferences for compiled colour traits in the stingless bees Melipona mondury and M. quadrifasciata . J Comp Physiol A 202, 615–627 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-016-1115-y

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