Do Bees Like Van Goghs Sunflowers?
A Sci-Art Experiment in Comparative Visual Attraction Lars Chittka and Julian Walker Biological Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London, UK Colour vision is biology, not simply physics. This is because colour vision systems differ widely between different animal species. The colour that an animal sees depends on its particular colour receptors and post-receptor neuronal wiring. Flower colours have evolved over 100 million years to address the colour vision of their bee pollinators. In a much more rapid process, cultural evolution has produced images of flowers that stimulate aesthetic responses in human observers. The colour vision and analysis of visual patterns differ in several respects between humans and bees. In this project, a behavioural ecologist (LC) and an installation artist (JW) explore how bees react to paintings of flowers. We use this unconventional approach in the hope of raising awareness for between-species differences in visual perception, and to provoke thinking
