SPONTANEOUS FLOWER CONSTANCY AND LEARNING IN HONEY-BEES AS A FUNCTIONOF COLOR

When presented with an artificial flower patch of blue and yellow pedi cellate flowers, individual honey bees, Apis mellifera L., became cons tant to one of the two Bower colours, rarely even sampling the alterna tive colour. Some bees visited only blue flowers while others visited only yellow flowers. This paper describes the onset of constancy for b ees that had had no experience with the experimental apparatus. In 302 0 visits, bees failed to land on or drink from the flower colour on wh ich they first landed only 17 times. This behaviour was not modified b y quality or quantity of reward, training to the experimental site, gr oup effects or presence of odour during trials. However, when we train ed bees to a target painted with two colours and then forced them to s ample monomorphic flower patches in sequence, all bees visited the onl y colour present: yellow or blue. When we subsequently offered these s ame bees yellow and blue flowers simultaneously (rewarded choices), th ey became constant. Eleven of 23 bees showed constancy to the less rew arding flower morph without even sampling the alternative. Those bees failed to sample even though they had previously been forced to visit the alternative flower morph, which offered a reward with twice the ca lories/volume. Constancy is thus spontaneous in honey bees, but it can be hidden by some experimental protocols designed to study learning. (C) 1997 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.