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New vistas on honey bee vision

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Abstract

The honey bee is a traditional animal model for the study of visual perception, learning, and memory. Extensive behavioral studies have shown that honey bees perceive, learn, and memorize colors, shapes, and patterns when these visual cues are paired with sucrose reward. Bee color vision is trichromatic, based on three photoreceptor types (S, M, L), which peak in the UV, blue, and green region of the spectrum. Perceptual color spaces have been proposed to account for bee color vision, and the anatomy of the visual neuropils in the bee brain was described to a large extent. In the last decade, conceptual and technical advances improved significantly our comprehension of visual processing in bees. At the behavioral level, unexpected cognitive visual capacities were discovered such as categorical and conceptual categorization. At the neurobiological level, molecular analyses of the compound eye revealed an intricate heterogeneity in the distribution of photoreceptors in the retina. Spatial segregation and integration of visual information in the bee brain has been analyzed at functional levels so far unexploited. These recent discoveries associated with the perspective of accessing the bee brain of harnessed bees while they perceive and learn visual cues open new avenues toward a comprehension of the neural substrates of visual perception and learning in bees. Understanding how the miniature brain of bees achieves sophisticated visual performances is a fundamental goal for the comparative study of vision and cognition.

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Acknowledgments

We thank two anonymous reviewers and A. Dyer (Melbourne, Australia) for productive collaboration in the field of this review. We also thank the French Research Council (CNRS), the University Paul Sabatier (Project APIGENE), and the National Research Agency (ANR: Project Apicolor) for generous support. A. Avarguès-Weber was supported by the French ministry of Research and T. Mota by a doctoral scholarship from the CAPES Foundation and the Brazilian government. M. Giurfa thanks the Program Raíces of the Argentinean Research Ministry for a Milstein Grant.

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  1. Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, Université de Toulouse (UPS), 118 route de Narbonne, 31062, Toulouse Cedex 9, France

    Aurore Avarguès-Weber, Theo Mota & Martin Giurfa

  2. Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, 118 route de Narbonne, 31062, Toulouse Cedex 9, France

    Aurore Avarguès-Weber, Theo Mota & Martin Giurfa

  3. School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS, UK

    Aurore Avarguès-Weber

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  1. Aurore Avarguès-Weber
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  2. Theo Mota
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  3. Martin Giurfa
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Correspondence to Martin Giurfa.

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Manuscript editor: Bernd Grünewald

Nouvelles perspectives sur la vision de l’abeille

Vision / sens de la vue / cognition visuelle / abeille / Apis mellifera / Insecta

Neue Blicke auf den Gesichtssinn der Bienen

Sehen / Gesichtssinn / visuelle Wahrnehmung / visuelle Kognition / Honigbiene / Apis mellifera / Insekt / wirbelloses Tier

Aurore Avarguès-Weber and Theo Mota contributed equally to this review.

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Avarguès-Weber, A., Mota, T. & Giurfa, M. New vistas on honey bee vision. Apidologie 43, 244–268 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13592-012-0124-2

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