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In part 2 of the study, the simultaneous choices of naive bees (Trigona carbonaria) were tested for 10 different colours using artiﬁcial ﬂowers. After each test, bees were sacrificed so all the data was independent, avoiding the risk of pseudo replication. In addition, the bees were not exposed to real flowers and reared on colour neutral disks prior to colour testing (fig. 6). Thus, their behaviour can be classified as innate (Giurfa, Núñez et al. 1995). It was necessary to pre-train bees to land on aluminium disks because it was not possible to get bees to land on colour stimuli without previous training (Giurfa, Núñez et al. 1995). I also tested whether bees preferred stimuli on the basis of brightness, spectral purity, contrast and green receptor contrast. My results showed that bees preferred stimuli irrespective of brightness, spectral purity, contrast and green receptor contrast (fig. 7). This was found to be consistent with the study by (Giurfa, Núñez et al. 1995). Thus, the only significant factor affecting bees’ choices was wavelength.

The results revealed that Trigona carbonaria has innate preferences for wavelengths of 422, 437 and 530 nm (fig. 8b). These results are remarkably similar to the innate preferences of flower naive honeybees and bumblebees in Europe (Menzel 1967; Lunau 1990; Giurfa, Núñez et al. 1995) that have innate preference for blue and violet. In those studies, it was suggested that the innate preference for blue correlates with blue and violet flowers having a slightly higher nectar reward than other flower colours in Europe (Giurfa, Núñez et al. 1995; Chittka, Ings et al. 2004). In the same way, I hypothesise that these the innate preferences of Trigona carbonaria might correspond to Australian flowers colours that are more profitable to bees. Thus, future studies may want to look for correlations between the amounts of nectar in Australian native flowers versus different colour categories to see if nectar content may have fine-tuned the colour preferences of Australian stingless bees.

Interactions between Australian stingless bees and a food deceptive orchid

In part 3, the results illustrated that bees preferred flowers with a UV signal than those without (fig. 12). The results are in agreement with the study by Peter and Johnson (2008) who removed the UV component of the flower by using sunscreen, which reduced the number of pollinator visits. In a similar way, the UV signal of C. carnea is likely to be important in attracting naive bees to the flower.

The UV-signal aside, I found that bees also significantly preferred the white flower colour over the pink flower colour (fig. 13). This result is consistent with part 2 of my study where I found that Trigona carbonaria showed innate preferences for certain colours over others. This could potentially result in fitness differences for the orchid depending on the colour of its flower. Here, it is possible that negative frequency-dependent selection may be important, with pollinators visiting the rarer morph and, in so doing, help retain floral colour v本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。