How many eyes do bees have? Facet and photographic vision. Vision of honey bees: how many eyes does a bee have

The body of an adult bee is distinctly divided into three parts: head, thorax and abdomen. While the head is a hard capsule, and the chest with the bases of wings and legs located on it also has relative rigidity, the segments of the abdomen can easily move relative to each other due to the soft connecting film, which is very important for the work of those in abdominal cavity organs. Let's take a closer look at the individual parts.

The capsule of the head hides the command center of the brain, important glands and the musculature of the antennae and mouthparts located externally. In addition, it has eyes. The strong convexity of the head in the frontal and lateral region, which provides strength, is reinforced from the inside by chitinous struts, to which the muscles of the mouth organs are attached. In the frontal region, a head shield stands out. When viewed from the front, there are differences in the shape of the head and in the arrangement of the eyes of the three bees.

The structure and location of the eyes of a bee

Simple and compound eyes in bees photo

Photo of a bee's eye at a magnification of 190 times

bee vision photo

The device of simple and complex eyes in a drone photo

So small and inconspicuous, but how amazing and admirable is their organization, hard work and dedication for the benefit of the entire bee family! God's perfect creations! In order to feed all their relatives, they are ready to work tirelessly, sacrificing themselves. And this miracle of nature is arranged no less amazing! Such a small body has such a complex structure that you won’t immediately remember what’s what. Everything is perfectly provided by mother nature, so that the bee lives and works not only for the benefit of her family, but also for the benefit of us.

Historical and biological data

Insect bees belonging to the order Hymenoptera, class of insects, type of arthropods, appeared on our planet more than 300,000 years ago and spread to all continents except Antarctica. Even ancient civilizations were famous for their honey, and beekeeping was considered a profitable occupation. AT ancient egypt and ancient rome bee breeding and honey production flourished, and bee products were highly valued and popular.

Beekeeping products include not only honey and wax. It is also bee pollen, pollen, propolis, royal jelly and bee venom, and honey bee, among other things, is also a natural pollinator of flowers and fruit plants. Without it, nothing would grow in our fields and gardens.

It is difficult to imagine the ecosystem of planet Earth without the existence of these furry hard workers.

In the world there are many breeds of honey insects that differ appearance and building. The most common are:

• Central Russian or European dark - the most common type. Differs in dark coloring, large body and short proboscis. The breed is disease resistant and quite prolific. It tolerates frosty winters well. One family can produce up to 30 kg of honey in one season. The disadvantage of this type of insect is increased aggression;
• Ukrainian - has a lighter color. It is smaller than European in size, but gives more honey - up to 40 kg from a family. The nature of these bees is softer. They do not sting their owners even when they open their hives. They also tolerate winter cold well and are resistant to disease;
• Caucasian is an aggressive breed, which, however, is distinguished by high productivity. The minimum that a family can give is 40 kg of honey per season. Their long proboscises easily get pollen and nectar from flowers. Minus the breed - weak resistance to disease;
• Italian - a calm and clean breed, giving High Quality honey. Has good disease resistance and increased immunity. Minus - low productivity;
• the Carpathian bee looks very similar to the Ukrainian one. Has a long proboscis and not very large body. Insects - calm disposition, but do not tolerate sharp drops temperatures and cold winters. Plus - high productivity (40 kg of honey per family per season).

Which breed to choose, it is worth deciding, depending on the location of the apiary and weather conditions.

The insect has an articulated structure, which is very well observed in larvae. The body of a hairy honey plant consists of:

• heads;
• chest;
• abdomen.

On the head are antennae that help the bee navigate in the dark, and 5 eyes, two of which have a complex structure. The head and body, in addition to a hard cover, have hairs that protect the insect from pollution, and are also responsible for the quality of pollination. There is also a proboscis on the head, with which the bee absorbs nectar, and jaws that move due to the head muscles.

Four wings extend from the chest of the insect. The posterior pair is less developed than the anterior. The wings, which look so fragile, are actually hardy and allow the furry worker to fly long distances. Three pairs of legs are also attached to the chest. On the back pair there are special baskets in which nectar and pollen are collected. There is also a nerve node, glands and respiratory organs in the chest.

The abdomen of an insect contains the organs of respiration, excretion, digestion, circulation, ganglions, genitals and sting. The wax glands are also located in the abdomen, which consists of segments that have the property of bending, contracting and unclenching.

The sting is pretty complex mechanism with which honey plants protect their nest. When bitten, the sting comes off with a piece internal organs and remains inside the body, but only when the insect bites an animal or a person. In this case, the bee dies after a while. If another insect stings, then the sting freely leaves the victim, and the furry flyer remains alive.

With as many as five eyes, the honey bee's vision is neither sharp nor clear, otherwise it would not be able to fly from flower to flower and collect nectar. Of these five organs, two of them have a complex structure, and three are simple. The compound eyes are located on the sides of the insect's head and do not have pupils or lenses. With them, they can only see images of objects in the form of separate points, as in a mosaic, however, those objects that bees meet in nature every day, they can distinguish in shape, for example, leaves and flower petals. The convex structure of the eyes allows you to simultaneously cover a large field of view, which is very important for orientation during flights.

On the crown, in the form of a triangle, there are 3 more points. These are the simple eyes of a bee. No one knows exactly what they are intended for, but there is an opinion that honey plants distinguish between day and night, that is, the intensity of illumination, and these auxiliary organs of vision increase the photosensitivity of compound eyes.

It is known that striped insects distinguish many colors: blue, blue-green, violet, yellow, and also, invisible to humans, ultraviolet. They see orange and green as yellow, but they don't see red at all. In order for a bee to find its hive, it must be painted in the color that is available to it for perception.

The bee family consists of three types individuals - one queen, ten or more drones and several thousand working insects. Bees cannot live separately and together they form a single living organism.

The function of the uterus is to lay eggs. Drones are only concerned with fertilizing her, and worker bees - everything else, that is, cleaning, building honeycombs, rearing offspring, caring for the queen, feeding her and drones, as well as collecting nectar and producing honey. Each insect, depending on age, has its own individual function. The work of the family is so debugged that it is admirable.

Bees feed on nectar and pollen, as well as honey, which is produced in such quantities that there is a huge supply for the winter. Honey is stored in honeycombs and sealed with wax. In this form, it can be stored for several years.

The dance of the bees is an integral part of the whole family of furry insects. It consists in the following - scout individuals, having discovered lands with large quantity honey plants, fly into the hive and report their find with the help of unusual fast movements. Insects, moving along the hive in a special way, transmit in this way a message about the location of the source of food, located a few meters from the dwelling. How slower dance, the farther from the hive is the food. Working insects repeat this dance, thereby accepting the information transmitted to them by scouts, and fly in the right direction. So surprisingly worked out in these extraordinary creatures is the notification system about the location of the cherished lands.

Perfect creation of nature honey bee , causes great respect and indescribable delight with all his short and active life, dedication and great diligence.

The honey bee is amazing in its own way mysterious creature nature, which, like all insects, has an unusual structure of the visual organs, as well as a certain number of them. How many eyes does a bee have?

If you look at the head of an insect, the first thing that attracts attention is a pair of huge bulging reticulated eyes located on its sides. These are the so-called compound compound eyes.

But they are not the only ones - on the top of the head there are three more small black specks that form a triangle. These are also the organs of vision, which are called simple eyes. It turns out that total the eye of a bee is five pieces. How are they arranged and what do bees need?

Eye Features

In a bee family, not all adults are the same. In addition to worker bees, which make up a significant part of it, it includes the queen bee and drones. In addition to all other differences, insects have a different location and shape of the visual organs, as well as some other differences in their internal structure.

With the help of such signs, one can visually attribute an individual to a particular category.

Why do bees have so many eyes

A - uterus, B - working individual, C - drone.

Two types of bee eyes have different purposes and are arranged differently:

The three small ones are simple clear lenses protruding from the chitinous cover of the head.

The images captured in each of them differ slightly, like neighboring frames of a photographic film taken from different angles. Then processed in the bee's brain, they give it a clear idea of ​​objects located at a close distance.

The insect also needs them in order to navigate in the tightness and darkness of the hive and on the flowers in the process of collecting honey or nectar.

This is what the eyes of queen bees look like

A pair of large oval eyes has a more complex structure. Their surface is not smooth and uniform, but consists of many separate fragments, shaped like honeycombs.

Each of these cells is a separate small eye or facet. It captures only small parts of the image.

The complete picture is assembled in the bee's brain like a mosaic, which gives it a complete picture of the object in question.

Such vision is fuzzy, blurry, but at the same time more large-scale and voluminous, used by insects during flights, when it is necessary to cover a wide space with their eyes.

Nature did not just take care to endow the bee with two types of eyes. With this type of vision, simple and compound eyes complement each other, making the picture of what is happening around complete, clear and realistic.

How do bees see this world?

This is how the eyes of the drone bee are located

The vision of a honey bee is colored. She is able to distinguish blue, white, blue-green, yellow and purple hues.

Red does not perceive and does not distinguish it from black, and orange and green seem to her to be shades of yellow. Simple eyes also have the ability to see in the ultraviolet spectrum.

The insect sees many objects in this way. It also perceives polarized light, so it can navigate the terrain without obstacles.

The device of the eyes allows you to perceive objects in volume. But the shape of objects is perceived differently: the individual differentiates geometric figures- squares and rectangles, but objects close to the outlines of a flower, defines perfectly.

The bee perfectly distinguishes moving objects. The motionless are less interesting to her. Accordingly, at the sight of an insect, it is not necessary to produce sudden movements that can provoke his aggression.

We know that bees are hardworking insects. We like their honey, which they make so diligently. We also use propolis, beeswax, poison in medical purposes. Over the centuries, humans have managed to domesticate working insects. They benefit not only people, but also plants. We seem to know everything about these workers. It becomes curious how they find fragrant flowers and purposefully fly to where they need to? To do this, we will study the vision of a bee.

When interviewing most people, to the question: "How many eyes does a bee have?" more than half will not be able to give the correct answer. If you look at the furry insect from afar, then you can safely say that the honey bee has two large eyes. However, nature considered that this was not enough. Yes, visually she has a pair of rather big eyes.

We are confused by elongated oval black balls located on the sides of the head. To find out how many eyes a bee has, the conclusions of laboratory researchers help. A detailed examination of the bees additionally reveals three simple eyes. Their local location is on the crown, so it is immediately impossible to determine the exact number of organs of vision of the insect. So how many eyes does a bee have? A detailed calculation is required.

The head of a bee is a hard capsule. When magnified, it is found that the honey bee has eyes not only on the sides, but also on the occipital part of the head capsule. In total, it turns out to count five eyes in a bee.

Let us consider the structure of complex and simple eyes in more detail. oval big eyes are called facets. It's a couple complex organs vision. Simple eyes located on the parietal part of the capsule are also called ocelli. These are the eyes that contain no more than one lens.

It is believed that the additional triangle of the eyes is of an auxiliary nature. Simple eyes help hardworking insects to distinguish morning from evening, to perceive the intensity of lighting in space.

As it turned out, the striped insect has complex vision. Of the five eyes, two are multi-faceted. They are also called compound eyes - they represent about six thousand independent cells. In drones, the number of such independent eyes is approximately eight thousand. It has to do with their functionality.

Important! The task of the drones is to carefully monitor the queen during the mating season in the hive. It is for this reason that they have more complex vision than honey bees.

The complex eyes of insects resemble honeycombs. They consist of separate eyes - hexagons located on the surface of the faceted eye. A single cell is called an ommatidium.

Each of them consists of 8–9 oblong visual cells, which have a thin border directed inside the bundle itself. In the process of joining the border, a glassy axis is formed. In it, light stimuli undergo receptor processing with the help of a chitinous lens and a crystalline cone. Ommatidia are separated from each other by pigment cells.

Separately, each cell is able to capture only those rays that run parallel to the axis. When summing the rays from all ommatidia, the final form of the uninverted image is obtained. The sharpness of the image of an object in insects differs significantly from human visual perception.

The photo clearly shows how it is perceived by a flying insect environment. Like a mosaic, the overall picture is divided into its small particles.

How do bees see?

With the number of eyes, everything is clear - they were eventually counted as many as five. The peculiarity of vision that the honey bee has is the difference in colors. Of interest is how the world appears before these insects. Scientists have carefully studied this issue.

As it turned out, the spectrum of color perception is significantly shifted towards short waves. In other words, the structure of the eyes of bees is very different from animals and humans. For example, a striped insect will not see red, but purple shades are perceived normally.

That is, a flower meadow, especially a poppy one, for them is not a bright red carpet at all. From a height, the bees will perceive everything in purple. Small insects manage to see colors ranging from red to purple. Moreover, they are able to capture ultraviolet waves.

Important! When building a bee town, it will not be superfluous for beekeepers to take note of the structural features of the visual organ of insects. The color of the hives is chosen based on the preferences of their future inhabitants.

Striped insects are able to distinguish up to two hundred light flashes per second. For comparison, a person tends to distinguish only 20. This speed helps insects communicate with each other.

Their dynamic movement in the hive, moving their paws, wings are a kind of signals that they transmit to their fellows. From the outside, a person does not notice any peculiarities in the movement of bees. But insects, using their "language", are able to accurately determine the distance to the required flower. Even swinging the flower to the sides will not prevent the bees from going astray.

Knowing how many pairs of compound eyes the inhabitants of the hives have, it can be assumed that their vision is akin to that of an eagle, but this is far from being the case. The bee individual is able to focus exclusively on large objects. Her eye is physically unable to perceive tiny details. Compared to humans, the latter perceives objects 30 times smaller than those seen by honey bees.

How does vision work in bees?

Each of the facet cells tends to be responsible only for image fragments. The number of individual parts of a particular object can reach up to a thousand. Then they, like a puzzle, add up in the bee brain into a single picture. This kind of vision can be called mosaic. In other words, the overall picture consists of a large number of image parts. This mechanism is observed in the compound eyes of insects.

In order to see a nearby object, industrious insects use simple eyes. With the exclusion of the functioning of faceted vision, the striped ones would be like blind kittens. They would constantly crash into something until they could see objects very close. It is thanks to the review of compound eyes that the bee is able to cover a wide space around it. The device of the lateral organs of vision helps to perfectly navigate during flights.

Useful video

Summing up

Summing up, we can safely say how many eyes a bee has - there are 5 of them. Also, small insects are able to distinguish much more shades than people. The same is the case with plants, some of them for human eye are perceived in the same way, which cannot be said about bees, they are able to distinguish all flowers. For example, take white flowers. For a person, this is about one color, but bees are able to catch shades. The situation is problematic with red flowers. To honey insects, they seem completely different in shade.

People have long "tamed" bees that were previously wild, and today they successfully use them to get honey, basically. As a by-product - propolis, pollen, poison. And the benefits of these hardworking insects for pollination of many plants can not be overestimated! In apiaries and dachas, one can often see unpretentious hives where bees live, carefully bringing people the products of their vital activity. Today we will talk about the structure of these insects, about their sense organs. Find out how they see and how many eyes bees have from our article.

sense organs

Bees orient themselves in the world around them with the help of These include: sight, hearing, smell, taste and others.

Smell and touch. They help the bee to maintain spatial orientation in a dark nest or hive. The organs of smell are located on the antennae of the insect. Some of the hairs that cover the bee's body are and are associated with nervous system. Interestingly, drones have several times more pores responsible for smell than ordinary bees.

The organs of taste are located in the throat of the bee, and on its proboscis, on the paws and antennae.

And these insects hear sounds with the help of organs located on the legs and other parts of the body.

By the way, bees have other organs responsible for a more complete perception of the world around them. They analyze the humidity of the atmosphere, the temperature difference, the amount of content in the air carbon dioxide. These organs allow the bees to exercise control over the microclimate of the dwelling for optimal development of insect larvae in the combs.

How many eyes do bees have?

Separate question - visual organs. If you look at a honeybee from afar, then to the question: “How many eyes does a bee have?” most likely you will answer: "Two". And you'll be wrong. Because there are actually five of them! Visually confusing are two huge compound eyes located on the sides of the head and looking like two ovals. There are three more simple eyes located on the crown of the insect, but they are noticeable on closer examination. Let us dwell in more detail on the question of how many eyes bees have.

Simple

Three simple ones, located on the crown, provide photographic vision and resemble a camera. In them, as on a photographic plate, visible objects are reproduced (they act on the endings branched there). All three images in the simple eyes of the bee are combined into one by superposition.

Complex

How many eyes does a bee have? Photo only in rare cases allows you to give the correct answer to this question. The compound eyes of an insect are made quite differently. If you look at the structure of the eye of a bee under a microscope, you can see the structure of the organ. The entire surface is mesh. It consists of thousands of facets (microareas in the form of a hexagon). Facets, by the way, with their structure resemble a honeycomb. Light-tight tubes pass from the facets to the nerve endings, through which the visual signal enters. Thus, this organ in an insect consists of cells fused together in in large numbers. A worker bee has up to five thousand of them, a drone has much more - up to eight. The uterus has five thousand small eyes in each compound eye. This type of vision is called faceted and is found in many insects (for example, in flies).

Mechanism of vision

Each of the cell-facets is responsible for only a part of the image. Such separate parts visible object maybe thousands, and they all add up in the bee's brain into a single whole. As a variant of the name of such vision - mosaic.

If a complex picture consists of many images, then with simple eyes insects look at objects up close. Interestingly, when the possibility of facet vision is excluded, the bees behave as if they are blind or have poor vision, and can only see objects by flying close enough to them. With compound eyes, the bee is able to survey large spaces, which allows it to navigate during flights.