Many flowers show heliotropism and the flowers are sun tracking. The discussed benefits of sun tracking flowers are heating up the flowers for better pollen germination and seed production, and offering heat reward for pollinators. Are there any studies investigating the consequences of untracking for the visual detection of flowers by bees? Are there any studies showing a preferential foraging direction of bees in regard to the position of the sun?
could be there some link with polarized light?
Polarized Light in Animal Vision: Polarization Patterns in Nature
https://books.google.bg/books?hl=bg&lr=&id=jkwvub-1zy8C&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=POLARIZED+LIGHT+INSECT+VISION&ots=Xb9SixXCJN&sig=EVmAF-pC42ECOTHB9CKMmnDvIC0&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=POLARIZED%20LIGHT%20INSECT%20VISION&f=false
Perception of Polarized Light
A beam of pure polarized light consists of a population of electromagnetic waves with parallel electric vectors. The natural world contains complex patterns of polarized light that humans cannot perceive but which are very useful for animals that can distinguish different electric vectors of light.=====and Fig. 3 ...somehow the position of sun matters
http://sites.sinauer.com/animalcommunication2e/chapter05.02.html
I do not doubt that bees are able to orient ba means of polarized light, but why should they limit their serch for flowers to one or two directions? My idea is that flowers might be oriented towards the sun, because the bees searching path is in the opposite direction due to constraints in the adaptation of photoreceptors for example.
The bees do not suffer, but the butterflies do - from polarization induced false colours. Preventing oblique exposure of petals to the Sun could reduce the polarized glare and stabilize the colour signal recognition. I plan to investigate this in the summer.
As fas as I know, the polarization-sensitive area in the bees' compound eye is at the dorsal rim, which means that the lower colours are nomally not seen with polarization-sensitive ommatidia.
This is what I meant: the bees do not perceive polarization induced false colours by the main retina, because they have twisted rhabdoms. They certainly do not look into the flowers by the DRA. But the butterflies do suffer from this artifact. So heliotropism might be intended to facilitate flower recognition by those who suffer.
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