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Science 22 March 1985:
Vol. 227. no. 4693, pp. 1492 - 1494
DOI: 10.1126/science.227.4693.1492
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Articles

How Bees Remember Flower Shapes

JAMES L. GOULD 1

1 Department of Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544

Bees are able to learn to distinguish between flowers with different shapes or patterns. Some studies have suggested that bees remember only isolated features such as spatial frequency and line angles, rather than the photographic search images that are characteristic of vertebrates. New data indicate that this presumptive vertebrate-invertebrate dichotomy is false; bees can store flower patterns as a low-resolution eidetic image or photograph.

Submitted on August 28, 1984
Accepted on November 30, 1984


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