Colour discrimination performance of honeybees was examined by training bee
s to a two-coloured disc presented on a vertical plane. Access to the food
reward was through the centre of the disc. In one experiment, the upper hal
f of the disc was yellow, and the lower half blue. In another experiment, t
his was vice versa. In either case, the learned disc was tested against eac
h of a series of ten discs whose colour differed in either the upper or the
lower half. A comparison between the results obtained in the two experimen
ts reveals that colour discrimination is significantly better in the lower
half of the frontal eye region than it is in the upper half. The results, s
imilar to earlier results obtained in pattern discrimination tasks, cannot
be explained by peripheral eye-region-specific specializations. It is propo
sed that the functional significance of the lower frontal visual field is b
ased on more central neural mechanisms that might constitute an adaptation
to the forager's natural needs.