Innate colour preferences of the Australian native stingless bee Tetragonula carbonaria Sm.
Innate preferences promote the capacity of pollinators to find flowers. Honeybees and bumblebees have strong preferences for 'blue' stimuli, and flowers of this colour typically present higher nectar rewards. Interestingly, flowers from multiple different locations around the world independently have the same distribution in bee colour space. Currently, however, there is a paucity of data on the innate colour preferences of stingless bees that are often implicated as being key pollinators in many parts of the world. In Australia, the endemic stingless bee Tetragonula carbonaria is widely distributed and known to be an efficient pollinator of both native plants and agricultural crops. In controlled laboratory conditions, we tested the innate colour responses of naïve bees using standard broadband reflectance stimuli representative of common flower colours. Colorimetric analyses considering hymenopteran vision and a hexagon colour space revealed a difference between test colonies, and a significant effect of green contrast and an interaction effect of green contrast with spectral purity on bee choices. We also observed colour preferences for stimuli from the blue and blue-green categorical regions of colour space. Our results are discussed in relation to the similar distribution of flower colours observed from bee pollination around the world.
School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Building 5.2.36, City Campus, GPO Box 2476, Melbourne, VIC, 3001, Australia. adrian.dyer@rmit.edu.au.|Department of Physiology, Monash University, Melbourne, 3800, Australia. adrian.dyer@rmit.edu.au.
Adrian G
AG
Dyer
School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, 3800, Australia.
Skye
S
Boyd-Gerny
School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Building 5.2.36, City Campus, GPO Box 2476, Melbourne, VIC, 3001, Australia.|Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Melbourne, 3800, Australia.
Mani
M
Shrestha
Department Biologie, Institut für Sinnesökologie, Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany.
Klaus
K
Lunau
School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Building 5.2.36, City Campus, GPO Box 2476, Melbourne, VIC, 3001, Australia.
Jair E
JE
Garcia
Department Biologie, Institut für Sinnesökologie, Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany.
Sebastian
S
Koethe
School of Biological Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, 3800, Australia.
Bob B M
BB
Wong
D000818:Animals; D001315:Australia; D001516:Bees / Q000502:physiology*; D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D003116:Color; D055253:Color Vision / Q000502:physiology*; D035264:Flowers / Q000737:chemistry; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D054817:Pollination / Q000502:physiology*
Flower; Insect; Pollinator; Southern hemisphere; Vision