Editing Bee learning and communication (section)

====Color discrimination====
[[Image:VonFrisch color vision experimental setup.jpg|thumb|alt=experimental design for testing color vision in honey bees.|Testing for color vision in honey bees. The majority of bees flew directly to the dish with the blue background as they had been trained to do. Thus, they were able to discriminate between gray and blue backgrounds, showing their capability for color vision.]]

The Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch began the exploration of color vision in honey bees when, in 1919, he asked whether or not bees have  [[color vision]].  He performed an elegant experiment that showed not only that the bees could discriminate colors but that they demonstrated associative learning.<ref name="Carew2000"/> He first trained his bees to feed from a small dish filled with a nectar-like sugar water.<ref name="Carew2000"/> This dish was placed on a piece of blue colored cardboard so that the color was visible to the bees as they arrived at the dish and fed. Next, von Frisch placed identically sized pieces of cardboard in varying shades of grey, each with a dish, all around the blue piece.<ref name="vonFrisch">Frisch, K. von. 1956. Bees; their vision, chemical senses, and language. Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press.</ref>  Lacking color vision, the bees should visit one or more of the gray pieces as often as the blue piece, but he found the vast majority of the bees flew directly to the blue piece of cardboard on which they had previously obtained their reward.<ref name="vonFrisch"/> The bees largely ignored the gray pieces which had not been rewarded.<ref name="vonFrisch"/> Von Frisch repeated the experiment with other colors like violet and yellow and got the same results.<ref name="Carew2000"/> Later other researchers used this experimental design to test the color vision of vertebrates.