A new touchscreen for behavioural research on bees

Flying insects encounter a considerable amount of multisensorial information during their first foraging trip and need to extract and process relevant cues to efficiently navigate their environment and locate food sources. Previous studies used static stimuli to investigate visual information processing during flight and the role of floral features on detection, landing, and flower handling behaviours. However, bees come across visual information sequentially, while sampling the visual scene and presenting visual features that change after landing would allow further understanding of the chronological aspect of visual information processing. Here, we describe a new methodology that uses the ShadowSense (TM) Multitouch technology to present interactive floral displays where a change in visual features is triggered upon a bee's landing. Two colonies of flower naive bumblebees (Bombus impatiens) were exposed to unicoloured and bicoloured unrewarded floral images in which floral guides in the form of dummy stamens were added, removed, or remained unchanged in the centre upon landing. Our findings confirm preference by flower-naive bumblebees for bicoloured flowers and corroborate that small central visual guides direct the place of landing. Therefore, we establish proof-of-concept of this new methodology for bee research by reproducing previously demonstrated behaviours and by reporting that bees react to a change in visual information on the touchscreen. To our knowledge, this is the first research providing a touchscreen technology that can reliably be used with bees. While its efficiency with similar-sized insects is yet to be confirmed, this technology provides new approaches for research on visual information processing as well as various behaviours in insects.