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Following the flight of the bumblebee for science and art

The answer to vision resides in understanding how the architecture of the visual network of an agent (natural or synthetic) represent its past interactions with the world. A virtual world for bumblebees, we call the Bee Matrix, was developed to address exactly this question.

The Bee Matrix is a virtual meadow of transilluminated Plexiglas flowers mounted vertically along one wall of a 1 metre cube Plexiglas box. Bumblebees not only thrive within this environment, but because their whole history of visual experience and flight behaviour can be completely controlled, we can fully quantify the relationship between visual ecology and behaviour in way that is not possible with most other animals - especially humans.



The Bee Matrix


The Bee Matrix is not only an important scientific instrument for addressing basic question about how insects - and by extension humans - see colour. The Bee Matrix has been exhibited as a living installation at several galleries/museums, where we perform real experiments on the colour vision of bumblebees. Recent venues include the Hayward gallery on the South Bank in London, The World Museum in Liverpool, the Science Gallery in Dublin and the Festival in London.

Please contact Beau Lottoif you would like to find out more about the possibility of exhibiting the Bee Matrix.



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Related reserach




Learning flight pathIn this video you see a bee learning to distinguish rewarding flower colours from unrewarding flowers. As you will see, initially her flight is random as she searches from flower to flower.

Learned flight pathIn this video you see the same bee as in ?Learning? after only 6 minutes of experience. Notice how she flies straight out of the hive and almost immediately lands on a rewarding flower and in doing so obtains a sugar reward.