Can bees see at a glance?

Abstract

Primates can analyse visual scenes extremely rapidly, making accurate decisions for presentation times of only 20 ms. We asked whether bumblebees, despite having potentially more limited processing power, could similarly detect and discriminate visual patterns presented for durations of 100 ms or less. Bumblebees detected stimuli and discriminated between differently oriented and coloured stimuli when presented as briefly as 25 ms but failed to identify ecologically relevant shapes (predatory spiders on flowers) even when presented for 100 ms. This suggests an important difference between primate and insect visual processing, so that while primates can capture entire visual scenes 'at a glance', insects might have to rely on continuous online sampling of the world around them, using a process of active vision, which requires longer integration times.