Feeding preference for seven types of bee bread by honey bees, Apis mellifera L. under laboratory conditions [electronic resource].

Includes reference.

Honey bees depend on visual and olfactory stimuli to locate flowers and their rewards (Backhaus, 1993 and Menzel el al., 1997). Foragers have innate abilities for discriminating colour and retain certain colour cues more effectively than others (Frisch, 1967 and Menzel, 1990). Also important as visual stimuli are floral shape or form (Free, 1970 and Lamb and Wells, 1995), pigmentation patterns (Petrikin and Wells, 1995) and floral symmetry (West and Laverty, 1998). Although colour is the main stimulus used by bees to locate flowers at a distance, odour is also used in flower selection (Beker el al., 1989 and Kirchner and Grasser, 1998).

Summary in Arabic.

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