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The Discovery of a Visual System by Adrian Horridge
282,00 lei
The Discovery of a Visual System
282,00 lei
In this book, Adrian Horridge sets out the curious and contentious history of how the visual system of the honeybee came to be understood and how, in his view, the current accepted theory is completely wrong. Based on his own meticulous experimental work and historic analysis of past literature over many years, Horridge tells the story of a century of neglect of old experimental results, errors of interpretation, sharp disagreements, and failures of the scientific method. The design of the experiments and the methods of making inferences from observations are critically examined, with the conclusion that often scientists are hesitant, imperfect and misleading, ignoring the work of others, and failing to consider alternative explanations.
The book then gives Horridge’s conclusions of what honeybees actually see. For example, honeybees detect some visual features such as edges and colours, but there is no sign that they reconstruct patterns or put together features to form objects. Bees detect motion but have no perception of what it is that moves, and certainly they do not recognise objects or colours by their shapes. Yet they clearly see well enough to fly and find food with a minute brain. The surprising conclusion is that bee vision is adapted to the recognition of places, not things or colours.
A proper understanding of the visual system of the honeybee (and other insects) can be used to manipulate visual cues in crop science and horticulture to encourage pollination, or enhance pest management. It is also vital for the development of artificial visual systems in robotics.
This fascinating book is essential reading for any scientist with an interest in insect neuroscience and visual systems, but also for anyone with an interest in the history of science and the way science itself can progress.
ADRIAN HORRIDGE was Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, Canberra. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1969 and became one of the foremost neuroscientists of his generation. He has been working on insect visual systems since the 1960s and continues that work to this day.
VIEW Contents
- About the Author
- Preface
- Introduction
- The Difficult Birth of Honeybee Colour Vision
- No Way to Untie the Spell
- Innovation, Deep Thought and Hard Work
- The Fundamentals of the Insect Compound Eye
- How Bees Distinguish Colours and Modulation
- Feature Detectors, Cues, Resolution, Preferences and Coincidences
- Symmetry and Asymmetry: Signposts in Route Finding
- Bee Vision Is Not Adapted for Pattern or Shape
- The Visual Control of Flight
- The Route to the Goal and Back Again
- What Was Not Mentioned
- What We Learned
- Appendix Training and Testing Bees
- Author Index
- Subject Index
VIEW Book Review
REVIEW BY NORMAN CARRECK NDB THE BEEKEEPERS QUARTERLY No.164, JUNE 2026
Adrian Horridge was a UK born neurobiologist who was for many years based at the Australian National University in Canberra, working right up until his death aged 96 in 2024. Over his long career, he was often controversial, but perhaps his main claim to fame was the discovery that moving insects measure distance using the “optic flow” of objects moving past their compound eyes, an idea later developed by Mandyam Srinivasan.. [He billed this] book as “the only account of what honey bees actually see”.
He had a long controversy with Karl von Frisch over the nature of bee colour vision, but his ideas have been disputed by others. I attended his plenary talk at the EurBee congress in Cluj Napoca, Romania some years ago, and his arguments seemed convincing to me, but a member of Lars Chittka’s research group (which studies bee vision) who was sat next to me was very sceptical...
Horridge covers the anatomy of insect compound eyes, and describes the discovery of colour vision in honey bees from the pioneering work of Sir john Lubbock in the 1880s onwards. He writes in a slightly idiosyncratic style; often chatty, personal and whimsical, but the description of the science is often rather impenetrable, making the main body of the book very hard work.
Many of Horridge’s students and colleagues had their backgrounds in Germany in the wartime and post war periods, and the book has a long account of what Horridge considers to be the iniquities of the German bee research establishment during the 20th century, which he feels led eminent professors to perpetuate incorrect and misleading ideas, with their junior colleagues reluctant to intervene for fear of destroying their career. He describes the history of the development of our understanding of bee vision, outlining what he sees as neglect of early experimental results, misunderstandings in interpretation, personal feuds, and failures to observe scientific method. He critically reviews experimental design, and concludes that scientists may be reluctant to consider alternative explanations for their results, may ignore previous work, and may stick to established ideas through thick and thin despite their own experimental evidence to the contrary.
In terms of what this means for the beekeeper, Horridge points out that due to the nature of their compound eyes, bees can detect features such as sharp edges and colours, but cannot see a focussed image or objects as such. They are extremely good at detecting movement, but cannot identify what is moving, and despite their tiny brain size can see well enough to navigate and find food. Horridge suggests that therefore bee vision is very relevant in the development of modern artificial vision systems, for example in robots. He concludes that bee vision evolved to recognise places rather than things.
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