All

The abstract appears below.  Interesting -- the press in each country has 
claimed this as ' their' scienctists.  Note that Germany, U.K., and 
Australia were all involved.  Not a one person or one country effort.


Honeybee (Apis mellifera) vision can discriminate between and recognise 
images of human faces

Adrian G. Dyer1,2,*, Christa Neumeyer1 and Lars Chittka3

1 Institut fur Zoologie III (Neurobiologie), Johannes Gutenberg 
Universität, Mainz, 55099, Germany,
2 Clinical Vision Sciences, La Trobe University, Victoria 3086, Australia
3 School of Biological Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London, London, 
E1 4NS, UK

* Author for correspondence at present address: Department of Plant 
Sciences, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EA, UK 
(e-mail: <mailto:[log in to unmask]>[log in to unmask] )

Accepted 13 October 2005

Recognising individuals using facial cues is an important ability. There is 
evidence that the mammalian brain may have specialised neural circuitry for 
face recognition tasks, although some recent work questions these findings. 
Thus, to understand if recognising human faces does require 
species-specific neural processing, it is important to know if non-human 
animals might be able to solve this difficult spatial task. Honeybees (Apis 
mellifera) were tested to evaluate whether an animal with no evolutionary 
history for discriminating between humanoid faces may be able to learn this 
task. Using differential conditioning, individual bees were trained to 
visit target face stimuli and to avoid similar distractor stimuli from a 
standard face recognition test used in human psychology. Performance was 
evaluated in non-rewarded trials and bees discriminated the target face 
from a similar distractor with greater than 80% accuracy. When novel 
distractors were used, bees also demonstrated a high level of choices for 
the target face, indicating an ability for face recognition. When the 
stimuli were rotated by 180° there was a large drop in performance, 
indicating a possible disruption to configural type visual processing.

Key words: visual processing, face recognition, honeybee, brain

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