ArticleJournal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology2016
Innate colour preferences of the Australian native stingless bee Tetragonula carbonaria Sm.
Article in Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Future of Native Bees in Australia Under Environmental and Anthropogenic Change.Ecology and evolution · 2026Review
- The magnet species effect of two-leaf squill (Frontiers in plant science · 2026Article
- A mosaic of colors: The influence of biotic and abiotic factors shaping flower color diversity across a tropical mountain ecosystem.American journal of botany · 2026Article
- Evolution of UV reflection in bee- and bird-pollinated flowers.Plant biology (Stuttgart, Germany) · 2026Article
- Polyacylated Delphinidin Biosynthesis Catalysed by PhF3'5'H-PhBGLU12-PhSCPL2 Determines the Blue Pigmentation in Cineraria (Pericallis hybrida).Plant biotechnology journal · 2025Article
- Pacific Northwest native plants and native cultivars part II: plant and pollinator traits.Environmental entomology · 2025Article
- The road less taken: Dihydroflavonol 4-reductase inactivation and delphinidin anthocyanin loss underpins a natural intraspecific flower colour variation.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- Flower colour and size-signals vary with altitude and resulting climate on the tropical-subtropical islands of Taiwan.Frontiers in plant science · 2024Article
- Artificial flowers as a tool for investigating multimodal flower choice in wild insects.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Does the Floral Nectary inBiology · 2022Article
- Comparative psychophysics of Western honey bee (Apis mellifera) and stingless bee (Tetragonula carbonaria) colour purity and intensity perception.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2022Article
- Caution with colour calculations: spectral purity is a poor descriptor of flower colour visibility.Annals of botany · 2022Article
- Comparative psychophysics of colour preferences in two species of non-eusocial Australian native halictid bees.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2021Article
- Article
- Fragmentary Blue: Resolving the Rarity Paradox in Flower Colors.Frontiers in plant science · 2020Review
- A Comparative Study of Food Source Selection in Stingless Bees and Honeybees: Scent Marks, Location, or Color.Frontiers in plant science · 2020Article
- Australian native flower colours: Does nectar reward drive bee pollinator flower preferences?PloS one · 2020Article
- Floral Color Diversity: How Are Signals Shaped by Elevational Gradient on the Tropical-Subtropical Mountainous Island of Taiwan?Frontiers in plant science · 2020Article
- Flowering Phenology and the Influence of Seasonality in Flower Conspicuousness for Bees.Frontiers in plant science · 2020Article
- Floral colour structure in two Australian herbaceous communities: it depends on who is looking.Annals of botany · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Innate preferences promote the capacity of pollinators to find flowers. Honeybees and bumblebees have strong preferences for 'blue' stimuli, and flowers of this colour typically present higher nectar rewards. Interestingly, flowers from multiple different locations around the world independently have the same distribution in bee colour space. Currently, however, there is a paucity of data on the innate colour preferences of stingless bees that are often implicated as being key pollinators in many parts of the world. In Australia, the endemic stingless bee Tetragonula carbonaria is widely distributed and known to be an efficient pollinator of both native plants and agricultural crops. In controlled laboratory conditions, we tested the innate colour responses of naïve bees using standard broadband reflectance stimuli representative of common flower colours. Colorimetric analyses considering hymenopteran vision and a hexagon colour space revealed a difference between test colonies, and a significant effect of green contrast and an interaction effect of green contrast with spectral purity on bee choices. We also observed colour preferences for stimuli from the blue and blue-green categorical regions of colour space. Our results are discussed in relation to the similar distribution of flower colours observed from bee pollination around the world.
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