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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
How Do Bees (and Humans) See Grey Levels?: Intuitive, logical, and anti-intuitive explanations for some curious observations

How Do Bees (and Humans) See Grey Levels?: Intuitive, logical, and anti-intuitive explanations for some curious observations

Horridge, Adrian
Paterson, Simon

Paperback

Medical ReferenceAgriculturePhysics

ISBN10: 1914934547
ISBN13: 9781914934544
Publisher: Northern Bee Books
Published: Mar 15 2023
Pages: 26
Weight: 0.16
Height: 0.07 Width: 6.69 Depth: 9.61
Language: English

There are several sources of serious confusion in the investigations of how bees and humans see grey and black. First, von Frisch trained bees to go to a coloured paper, and then tested whether they could distinguish that colour from a palette of 15 shades of grey placed together on a test board. Unfortunately, he used papers made from wood pulp, which do not reflect ultraviolet, so the UV receptors were excluded. Secondly,16 years later it was shown that bees require a 25% difference in brightness to discriminate grey levels, so his test was uncertain. Thirdly, bees are dichromats, and detect only green contrast and the fraction of light that stimulates the blue receptors. The most interesting confusion is that grey photons do not exist, but that does not affect bees because they are functional dichromats and treat grey like any other colour. No problem. The UV receptors in the compound eyes of the bee are used to detect the direction of the sky to stabilize flight and escape upwards when disturbed.

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