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Flower detection and acuity of the Australian native stingless bee Tetragonula carbonaria Sm.

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An Erratum to this article was published on 29 August 2016

Abstract

We tested the endemic Australian Tetragonula carbonaria bee as a model of how colour vision may allow these small bees to find flowers. In a Y-Maze apparatus, we presented stimuli that contained both chromatic- and green-receptor contrasts, or only had chromatic contrast to free flying bees. Stimuli were detected at visual angles of 9.5° and 9.3°, respectively. We next made morphological measurements of the compound eye under high magnification using a digital microscope, and despite a relatively small eye size with a surface area of 0.64 ± 0.02 mm2, the compound eye contained 3010 ± 10 ommatidia. Measurements of diverging rays of light using antidromic illumination revealed a mean interommatidial angle in the frontal visual field measures 1.56° ± 0.10°. Finally, we calculate that the minimum number of ommatidia that need to be excited for object detection is 33, which is much higher than for object detection in bumblebees and for the detection of objects providing both colour and green contrasts by honeybees, but lower for the detection of an object lacking green contrast in honeybees. We discuss reasons that may explain potential tradeoff for foraging bees.

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Acknowledgments

We thank school of Biological Sciences at Monash University for providing the CT lab to conduct our experiments. We thank Dr Tim Heard for supplying native stingless bee hives and his keen advice on bee kee**, and Dr Mani Shrestha for discussions. This research was supported under Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project numbers DP130100015, DP0878968 and DP160100161). AGD thanks the ARC for a QEII fellowship to conduct the initial phases of the research, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for facilitating collaborative exchanges.

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    1. School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, 3001, Australia

      Adrian G. Dyer & Jair Garcia

    2. Department of Physiology, Monash University, Melbourne, 3800, Australia

      Adrian G. Dyer & Martin Streinzer

    3. Department of Neurobiology, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

      Martin Streinzer

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    1. Adrian G. Dyer
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    A. G. Dyer and M. Streinzer contributed equally, listed alphabetically.

    An erratum to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00359-016-1114-z.

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    Dyer, A.G., Streinzer, M. & Garcia, J. Flower detection and acuity of the Australian native stingless bee Tetragonula carbonaria Sm.. J Comp Physiol A 202, 629–639 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-016-1107-y

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