Colour is complex for a bee, but does not involve brightness

When we look at colourful objects such as flowers, brightness (or the lightness of colour) is a key descriptor for how humans interpret visual information. Therefore, brightness has been commonly considered in analyses that assist us to understand the evolution of flower colours.

While complex structures in our human brains bind brightness and other colour information together, it is not known if insect pollinators such as honey bees also incorporate brightness in their colour perception.

Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.

Using behavioural experiments, we show that honey bees trained to collect sugar water from artificial flowers do not perceive brightness in a colour processing context. This result suggests that brightness may not be a useful descriptor when investigating how honey bees perceive colourful flowers.

Future studies need to be cautious when deciding which components of floral cues are important to pollinators in ecological settings.

Read the full paper — Why colour is complex: Evidence that bees perceive neither brightness nor green contrast in colour signal processing by Leslie Ng, Jair E. Garcia and Adrian G. Dyer.