The famed flower fidelity of bees has long been of interest to observers. Like anything else, flower constancy has its limits, mostly related to the bees' perceptual abilities. Quite possibly these abilities become impaired in older bees. Foragers tend to be the oldest and most expendable bees of the colony. This is logical because foraging is the riskiest job. The bees' system of using the oldest members for the riskiest jobs is the opposite of ours: we use the young and healthy for such jobs as soldiers or police.

> The flower constancy of the honey-bee was first accurately described by Aristotle in the following terms: "On each expedition the bee does not fly from a flower of one kind to a flower of another, but flies from one violet, say, to another violet, and never meddles with another flower until it has got back to the hive". 

Grant, V. (1950). The flower constancy of bees. The Botanical Review, 16(7), 379-398.

> It is proposed that a first requirement for an efficient pollination system with many species of plants in a habitat is flower fidelity by individual pollinators. Individual bees of a species are well-known to be conditioned to forage from any of a great variety of morphological types of flowers. However, the fidelity breaks down if the flowers blooming at any one time are not sufficiently different from each other.

Heinrich, B. (1975). Bee flowers: a hypothesis on flower variety and blooming times. Evolution, 325-334.

> Flower constancy is sometimes based on the simple circumstance that only one flower species is present in the insect’s foraging area (for example, in an orchard or a rape-seed field). In the present context, however, we discuss flower constancy at a foraging site that offers a choice of flower species, because, in this case, flower fidelity is based on the insect’s capacity to discriminate among flowers.

> Early training experiments were conducted using patterns presented on a horizontal plane, and the criterion for choosing a pattern was the bee’s landing on it. The results of these studies showed that, under these conditions, bees do not discriminate well between geometrical (closed) shapes such as squares and triangles, but they discriminate well between patterns that differ in their degree of disruption.

Dafni, A., Lehrer, M., & Kevan, P. G. (1997). Spatial flower parameters and insect spatial vision. Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 72(02), 239-282.

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