Short Answer Karl von Frisch studied the interactions between bees and flowers.
ID: 33542 • Letter: S
Question
Short Answer
Karl von Frisch studied the interactions between bees and flowers. He wanted to know how bees select which flower to go to. In particular, he wanted to know whether the bees could see different flower colors and would, therefore, select flowers based on their color.
In his first experiment, von Frisch put out pieces of red- and blue-colored paper, each of which had a bowl on top. In the bowl on the blue paper, he put sugar water; he left the bowl on the red paper empty. Bees discovered the sugar water in the bowl on the blue paper and ate it, returning again and again with other bees to get more.
After a while, von Frisch took away the papers and bowls. He replaced them with two new bowls with colored paper, identical to the first pair except that both bowls were empty this time. He found that bees swarmed around the bowl on the blue paper, ignoring the bowl on the red paper.
Note that von Frisch already knew that bees like sugar water; this issue is not being tested in this
experiment.
It occurred to von Frisch that his experiment was not well controlled. Besides their colors, there was another difference between the papers that bees might use to tell them apart. The papers were very different in overall intensity of color; the red paper was much darker than the blue paper. In other words, even without color vision (like on a black-and-white TV), the papers would look different. Although you couldn
Explanation / Answer
4)
Intensity is an uncontrolled variable in his first experiment did von Frisch correct in the second experiment, it is important because based on intensity of the color the bees might get attract to a single color.
5)
He controlled the Intensity variable by choosing low two different colors with same intensity.
6)
Conclusions on bee color vision have often been made without referring them to the experimental context in which they were obtained, and thus presented as absolute facts instead of realizing that subtle variations in conditioning procedures might yield different results.
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