Abstract
The colour vision system of bees and humans differs mainly in that, contrary to humans, bees are sensitive to ultraviolet light and insensitive to red light. The synopsis of a colour picture and a UV picture is inappropriate to illustrate the bee view of flowers, since the colour picture does not exclude red light. In this study false-colour pictures in bee view are assembled from digital photos taken through a UV, a blue, and a green filter matching the spectral sensitivity of the bees’ photoreceptors. False-colour pictures demonstrate small-sized colour patterns in flowers, e.g. based on pollen grains, anthers, filamental hairs, and other tiny structures that are inaccessible to spectrophotometry. Moreover, false-colour pictures are suited to demonstrate flowers and floral parts that are conspicuous or inconspicuous to bees. False-colour pictures also direct the attention to other ranges of wavelength besides ultraviolet demonstrating for example blue and yellow bulls’ eyes in addition to UV bulls’ eyes which previously have been overlooked. False-colour photography is a robust method that can be used under field conditions, with various equipment and with simple colour editing.
Highlights
Flowers serve as filters signalling attractants for pollinators as well as deterrents for flower antagonists (Junker & Blüthgen 2010)
False-colour photography of flowers and floral colour patterns in bee view is an extension to the well-established UV-photography
The pre-change as well as the post-change colour of the Common Lungwort Pulmonaria officinale (Boraginaceae) are reflecting ultraviolet light and are conspicuous for bees according to the false-colour picture (Fig. 13 D, E, F)
Summary
Flowers serve as filters signalling attractants for pollinators as well as deterrents for flower antagonists (Junker & Blüthgen 2010). Since many flower visitors, such as hummingbirds (Herrera et al 2008), bats (Winter et al 2003), bees (Peitsch et al 1992), hoverflies (Lunau 2014), beetles (Martínez-Harms et al 2012), butterflies and moths (Kelber et al 2002; Arikawa 2003) are sensitive to ultraviolet light, these flower visitors necessarily view different aspects of the spectral reflectance of flowers as compared to UV-blind humans Many of these flower visitors possess a different number of colour photoreceptor types compared to humans, e.g. one in bats, two in beetles, three in bees, four in hummingbirds and flies, and from three up to fifteen in butterflies (Briscoe 2008; Chen et al 2016). To understand flower colours and floral colours pattern as bees might see them Kevan
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