Data_Sheet_1_Naïve and Experienced Honeybee Foragers Learn Normally Configured Flowers More Easily Than Non-configured or Highly Contrasted Flowers.pdf

Angiosperms have evolved to attract and/or deter specific pollinators. Flowers provide signals and cues such as scent, colour, size, pattern, and shape, which allow certain pollinators to more easily find and visit the same type of flower. Over evolutionary time, bees and angiosperms have co-evolved resulting in flowers being more attractive to bee vision and preferences, and allowing bees to recognise specific flower traits to make decisions on where to forage. Here we tested whether bees are instinctively tuned to process flower shape by training both flower-experienced and flower-naïve honeybee foragers to discriminate between pictures of two different flower species when images were either normally configured flowers or flowers which were scrambled in terms of spatial configuration. We also tested whether increasing picture contrast, to make flower features more salient, would improve or impair performance. We used four flower conditions: (i) normally configured greyscale flower pictures, (ii) scrambled flower configurations, (iii) high contrast normally configured flowers, and (iv) asymmetrically scrambled flowers. While all flower pictures contained very similar spatial information, both experienced and naïve bees were better able to learn to discriminate between normally configured flowers than between any of the modified versions. Our results suggest that a specialisation in flower recognition in bees is due to a combination of hard-wired neural circuitry and experience-dependent factors.

被子植物经过进化，已发展出吸引或威慑特定传粉者的能力。花朵通过提供诸如气味、色彩、大小、图案和形状等信号和线索，使得某些传粉者能够更加轻松地找到并访问同种花朵。在漫长的进化历程中，蜜蜂与被子植物实现了协同进化，使得花朵对蜜蜂的视觉和偏好更具吸引力，并允许蜜蜂识别特定的花朵特征，从而做出关于在哪里觅食的决定。在本研究中，我们测试了蜜蜂是否天生就调整好了处理花朵形状的能力，通过训练有花朵经验和无花朵经验的蜜蜂觅食者，在图像为正常配置的花朵或空间配置被打乱的花朵之间进行区分。我们还测试了通过增加图像对比度，使花朵特征更加显著，是否能够改善或损害表现。我们使用了四种花朵条件：（一）正常配置的灰度花朵图片，（二）打乱配置的花朵，（三）高对比度的正常配置花朵，（四）非对称打乱的花朵。尽管所有花朵图片都包含了非常相似的空间信息，但无论是经验丰富的蜜蜂还是无经验的蜜蜂，它们都更擅长学会区分正常配置的花朵，而不是任何修改版本的花朵。我们的结果表明，蜜蜂在花朵识别上的专业化是由于硬编码的神经网络和经验依赖性因素的结合所致。