The preference for symmetry in flower-naïve and not-so-naïve bumblebees

Relativizing innateness: innateness as the insensitivity of the appearance of a trait with respect to specified environmental variation

“…Second, when some researchers talk about mice with innate anxiety, they might be taken to mean that the mice have anxiety that is not due to some set of factors, potentially including the factor they are testing, such as the inhibiting of a G-protein coupled receptor (Sweeney et al 2013). Third, the preference in honeybees for bilaterally symmetric stimuli has been described as innate in the sense that it appears without prior exposure to flowers; I suggest that the preference is innate with respect to prior exposure to flowers (Plowright et al 2011). …”

Getting to the start line: how bumblebees and honeybees are visually guided towards their first floral contact

“…the lines were not perceived as blurred together (Lehrer et al, 1995). Preferences for relatively high spatial frequency patterns have also been reported (Dafni et al, 1997;Plowright et al, 2011). Several possible explanations might account for the discrepancies across studies: (1) the absolute values for spatial frequencies likely differ across studies, with ''high'' and ''low'' being relative terms.…”

“…This practice may be innocuous when studying colour preferences: bees do not generalize their experience from pre-training with one colour to testing on others, as long as the colours seem very different to them (Gumbert, 2000). Nonetheless, explicit tests of the effects of pre-training on subsequent pattern choice have shown differences in the behaviour of untrained (flower-naïve) and pre-trained (not-so-naïve) bumblebees (Séguin and Plowright, 2008;Plowright et al, 2011). Hence, the untested assumption that pre-training is neutral or unrelated to the test of floral preferences is tenuous.…”

Radio Frequency Identification and Motion-sensitive Video Efficiently Automate Recording of Unrewarded Choice Behavior by Bumblebees

“…As a result, many researchers rely on a less than ideal technique: pre-training workers to feed inside the testing space from ostensibly neutral stimuli that researchers deem to be different from the experimental stimuli. However, recent experiments have shown that stimuli that were thought to be neutral (i.e., stimuli that do not influence subsequent choice behavior in a testing session) have influenced preferences in unexpected ways 1 . Automated systems that include Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) 2 and motion-sensitive video recordings may offer an opportunity solve this problem.…”

“…Automated systems that include Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) 2 and motion-sensitive video recordings may offer an opportunity solve this problem. The aim of the study was twofold: (1) primarily to contribute to the literature on unlearned floral preferences by bumblebees, (2) and secondarily to evaluate two choice measurement systems, as recorded by two different automated recording devices.…”