Silly Little Country

Don't Stand on Your Head

... if you want those bees to recognize you.

Using differential conditioning, individual bees were trained to visit target face stimuli and to avoid similar distractor stimuli from a standard face recognition test used in human psychology. Performance was evaluated in non-rewarded trials and bees discriminated the target face from a similar distractor with greater than 80% accuracy. When novel distractors were used, bees also demonstrated a high level of choices for the target face, indicating an ability for face recognition. When the stimuli were rotated by 180 degrees there was a large drop in performance, indicating a possible disruption to configural type visual processing.

SillyWife, the daughter of an apiarist, probably knew all this stuff.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 12:30 PM