Pa. Couvillon et Me. Bitterman, LEARNING IN HONEYBEES AS A FUNCTION OF AMOUNT OF REWARD - FURTHER EXPERIMENTS WITH COLOR, Animal learning & behavior, 21(1), 1993, pp. 23-28
Foraging honeybees were trained individually with successively present
ed targets differing in color, one containing 5 mul and the other 20 m
ul of 50% sucrose solution, after which preferences were measured in u
nrewarded choice tests. The targets were conical, designed to control
for the possibility of differential delay of reward stemming from the
greater detectability of the larger as compared with the smaller drops
of sucrose when the drops were presented on the conventional flat tar
gets. The new results for color, like recent results for odor, can be
understood on the assumption that the attractiveness of a stimulus inc
reases as a function of the strength of its association with reward an
d that the effect of amount of reward is on asymptotic strength.