
The Discovery of a Visual System: The Honeybee
Adrian Horridge(Author)
CABI Publishing
Published on 23. May 2019
Book
Hardback
296 pages
978-1-78924-089-4 (ISBN)
Description
This book is the only account of what honeybees actually see. 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. The surprising conclusion is that bee vision is adapted to the recognition of places, not things. In this volume, Adrian Horridge also 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.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Wallingford
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 246 mm
Width: 178 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
885 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78924-089-4 (9781789240894)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Adrian Horridge
Discovery of a Visual System - The Honeybee, The
E-Book
05/2019
CABI Publishing
€51.49
Available for download
Person
Adrian Horridge is formerly of The Australian National University, Canberra.
Content
1: The Difficult Birth of Honeybee Colour Vision 2: No Way to Untie the Spell 3: Innovation, Deep Thought and Hard Work 4: The Fundamentals of the Insect Compound Eye 5: How Bees Distinguish Colours and Modulation 6: Feature Detectors, Cues, Resolution, Preferences and Coincidences 7: Symmetry and Asymmetry: Signposts in Route Finding 8: Bee Vision is Not Adapted for Pattern or Shape 9: The Visual Control of Flight 10: The Route to the Goal and Back Again 11: What Was Not Mentioned 12: What We Learned