Bees cannot perceive complex visual stimuli ‘at a glance’. Bees were trained in a flight arena with six feeding platforms (blue horizontal lines in the panels on the bottom) positioned in front of a 120 Hz (8.33 ms refresh rate) gaming monitor. Separate groups of bees were trained on five tasks, ranging from simple detection to complex pattern discrimination, in four temporal presentation conditions, ranging from continuous presentation (static) to timed presentation (repetition rate randomized between 500 and 1000 ms) for 100, 50 or 25 ms. (a) Detection of oriented bar; (b) discrimination of 45° from −45° bars; (c) coarse colour discrimination yellow-blue; (d) fine colour discrimination yellow-orange; (e) discrimination of spider shape from circle (only two of six stimuli shown for simplicity). All of the bees were successful in acquiring the simple detection task, regardless of presentation duration. For fine colour discrimination, stimulus durations of at least 50–100 ms were required (d), while only a single bee learned the shape discrimination at 100 ms, even though all bees learned the task under continuous presentation (e). Modified from Nityananda et al. [], with permission.