The Visual Context of Foraging: Interactions Between Bee Vision and Floral Pollination with Computational Models

Bees forage in a world of varied visual information. To find flowers, bees must cope with a variety of contextual conditions, including background colours, floral spatial distributions, and floral colour distributions. This visual context is known to affect the accuracy of bee decisions and has influenced both bee vision and flower evolution. Using a variety of computational techniques, including agent-based models, our results reveal how aspects of visual context contribute to the relationship between bees and flowers, and how we can harness contextual cues to direct improvements in agricultural pollination.