Includes bibliographical references and index.

The difficult birth of honeybee colour vision -- No way to untie the spell -- Innovation, deep thought and hard work -- The fundamentals of the insect compound eye -- How bees distinguish colours and modulation -- Feature detectors, cues, resolution, preferences and coincidences -- Symmetry and asymmetry: signposts in route finding -- Bee vision is not adapted for pattern or shape -- The visual control of flight -- The route to the goal and back again -- What was not mentioned -- What we learned.

Bees detect some visual features such as edges and colours, but there is no sign that they reconstruct patterns or put together features to form objects. Bees detect motion but have no perception of what it is that moves, and certainly they do not recognize "things" by their shapes. Yet they clearly see well enough to fly and find food with a minute brain. Bee vision is therefore relevant to the construction of simple artificial visual systems, for example for mobile robots. This book, which contains 12 chapters, is the only account of what honeybees actually see. It sets out the curious and contentious history of how bee vision came to be understood, with an account of a century of neglect of old experimental results, errors of interpretation, sharp disagreements, and failures of the scientific method. The design of the experiments and the methods of making inferences from observations are also critically examined, with the conclusion that scientists are often hesitant, imperfect and misleading, ignore the work of others, and fail to consider alternative explanations. The erratic path to understanding makes interesting reading for anyone with an interest in the workings of science but particularly those researching insect vision and invertebrate sensory systems.

Access limited to subscribing institution.

Also available in print format.

Title from PDF title page (viewed June 8, 2019).