COLOR GENERALIZATION AND CHOICE BEHAVIOR OF THE HONEYBEE APIS-MELLIFERA-LIGUSTICA

The colour choice of free-flying honeybees Apis mellifera ligustica was tested on a food-source simulator with 12 non-rewarded and coloured feeders (blue, violet or yellow) after training to rewarded feeders marked with aluminium discs. Bees trained to the aluminium signal showed a preference for violet followed by blue and finally by yellow. These results are interpreted using a model which allows a determination of the bee's perceptual distances between the stimuli used. The rank order obtained in colour-choice experiments can be related to generalization processes in which bees trained to the aluminium signal preferred the colour signal which is perceptually closest to the pretrained signal, even if innate colour preferences could not be discarded. Since bees generalize effectively from one visual cue to the other, it is to be expected that any pretraining would have a strong impact on the colour choice even if no obvious colour marks or "neutral" marks (aluminium discs) are used.