Research on Bee Vision

New insight into how bees see is a Biology News Net piece revealing results of research from Monash University in Australia. Dr. Adrian Dyer is a reknown bee expert in Australia. His research, alluded to in this article, indicates that honeybees have the ability to learn to recognize human faces from different vantage points.

A reward and punishment system was used to test bee capabilities. A sugar reward was given for correct choices and a bitter tasting solution for incorrect ones. Faces were shown on a vertical screen and bees learned which face was the correct one to choose from. Dr. Dyer explains: "Bee brains clearly use image interpolation to solve the problem. In other words, bees that had learnt what a particular face looked like from two different viewpoints could then recognise a novel view of this target face. However, bees that had only learnt a single view could not recognise novel views."

The research results, published in PLoS ONE, may enable advances in artificial intelligence which has had a record of poor performances in face recognition. Imaging technology also was mentioned as possibly benefiting from the research. I can see possible benefits in the security field as well.