Study
Der Farbensinn und Formensinn der Biene
von Frisch, Karl
Zoologische Jahrbücher, 1914
Bees were trained to feed from a card of one colour, then tested against that colour placed among an array of grey cards spanning the full range of brightness. A bee choosing on brightness alone would be unable to pick the coloured card reliably from a grey of matching lightness.
- Studied in
- Apis mellifera
- Sample size
- trained honey bees choosing between coloured and grey cards
Trained bees selected the coloured card regardless of the brightness of the surrounding greys, and confused blue-green with grey — the pattern expected of an animal with colour vision and a different set of receptors from ours.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Bees have true colour vision, not merely brightness discrimination, and their colour categories differ from a human’s.
How NatureHQ reads it
The grey-card control is the whole experiment, and it is still the standard test a century later: without it, an animal picking a yellow card has only shown it can tell light from dark. Von Frisch was arguing against an authority who held that all invertebrates were colour-blind, and the design is built to make the alternative explanation impossible rather than merely unlikely. The ultraviolet channel was not established until decades later, so the bee’s colour space turned out to be shifted further from ours than even this showed.
- A 1914 study with the analysis conventions of its time and no statistical treatment as now understood.
- Establishes colour vision and confusion boundaries, not the receptors underlying them.
- One species, trained under semi-natural conditions.
One coloured card among a hundred greys
Does a bee returning to a blue card see blue, or is it only telling light from dark?
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
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