The physiology of the honey bees

The sense of face

With the most simply built three small point eyes on their vertex the bees are able to notice only bright and darkness and to in this way determine the correct time for the morning trip and the attitude of the flights on the evening. On the other hand their compound eyes are sensory organs of amazing efficiency. Bees can see colors.
How do bees take colors were?
However bees see other colors than humans. If one divides a white ray of light by a prism into different wavelengths, then we see the waves between 800 Nm to 400 Nm as colors (colors of the rainbow). Bees do not see red (800-700 Nm), but it can the Ultaviolettbereich notice. Their vision is enough from 650 Nm to 300 Nm. E.G. bees appear the poppy red for humans, black. Some white blooms appear bees, due to its ultraviolet admixture cyan.
Also forms see bees other one than humans. For us figures, like triangle, which can be differentiated easily, circle, rectangle can not keep bees apart; but they recognize strongly arranged in relation to weakly arranged structures. The raster-like visual field, which the compound eyes obtain, is not geeignent for the differentiation of fine-structured figures. On the other hand the large resolving power of 250 light attractions per sec. is amazing (humans: 40 light attraction/sec.). The bees replace the spatial resolving power by a temporal.
The bee eye has the moreover one the ability, polarized light (in one level are appropriate for light its oscillations), to recognize; polarized light is contained in the reflected sunlight. The ability of the bee to recognize plays a role with orientation in the landscape.

Abb. Compound eye