Viscovery SOMine is a software tool for advanced analysis and monitoring of numerical data sets. It was developed for professional use in business, industry, and science and to support dependency analysis, deviation detection, unsupervised clustering, nonlinear regression, data association, pattern recognition, and animated monitoring. Based on the concept of self-organizing maps (SOMs), it employs a robust variant of unsupervised neural networks-namely, Kohonen's Batch-SOM, which is further enhanced with a new scaling technique for speeding up the learning process. This tool provides a powerful means by which to analyze complex data sets without prior statistical knowledge. The data representation contained in the trained SOM is systematically converted to be used in a spectrum of visualization techniques, such as evaluating dependencies between components, investigating geometric properties of the data distribution, searching for clusters, or monitoring new data. We have used this software tool to analyze and visualize multiple influences of the ocellar system on free-flight behavior in giant honeybees. Occlusion of ocelli will affect orienting reactivities in relation to flight target, level of disturbance, and position of the bee in the flight chamber; it will induce phototaxis and make orienting imprecise and dependent on motivational settings. Ocelli permit the adjustment of orienting strategies to environmental demands by enforcing abilities such as centering or flight kinetics and by providing independent control of posture and flight course.Data sets collected from biological, psychological, and social experiments or data taken from social, economic, or marketing systems often contain hidden information that is difficult to extract. This is the starting point for a number of analysis methods, commonly known by the term data mining. Widely used traditional methods, such as statistical algorithms, mainly reproduce dependencies within data in a limited way, since they are mostly based on linear principles and a priori assumptions. Such methods imply that it would be extremely difficult to interactively explore high-dimensional, complex data distributions and their underlying nonlinear relationships.Newer models, such as supervised neural network techniques, impose high demands on tuning the underlying algorithms (e.g., in order to design the network topology), which very often demand much effort and a timeconsuming trial-and-error process, owing to the complexity ofreal-world applications. On the other hand, statisticalThe investigation of the ocellar role in flight control was supported by Austrian Scientific Foundation Grant P8746-BIO. The second author has a financial interest in the software described in this article. The authors thank Elisabeth Jaquemar for final improvements of the English. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to G. Kastberger, Institute of Zoology, Department of Neurobiology, KarlFranzens University, A80 I0 Graz, Austria (e-mail: gerald.kastberger@ kfunigraz.ac...

-We investigated whether individual worker bees of a single Apis laboriosa colony can be reidentified by their wing patterns alone. In a sample of 183 bees we pre-selected 100 workers belonging to 12 intra-colonial patrilines and re-identified them by 25 size-free wing characters. Re-identification was carried out by Self Organizing Map (SOM) reclassification and conventional discriminant analysis (DA) using the protocols of recognition (data for training and testing the model are equal or slightly modified by white noise), and prediction (test data are unknown to the model). SOM recognition of wing shaping was found to be more robust than that resulting from DA. If the test data were altered by white noise, SOM recognition success was 100% within a range of 3% modification which corresponded to the overall measurement error; under these conditions DA success was less than 40%. The SOM prediction capacity was tested using four test-training data ratios and reached 90% under a two-step reclassification protocol.individuality / wing pattern / SOM re-classification / Giant honeybee / Apis laboriosa