How many eyes do bees have? Features of the vision of a bee. The structure of the organs of vision of the honey bee

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?

A separate issue is the 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 look like 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 large numbers of cells fused together. 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 in a complex picture it consists of many images, then with simple eyes insects look at objects close up. It is interesting that when the possibility of facet vision is excluded, the bees behave as if they are blind or have poor vision, and can see objects only when they fly close enough to them. With compound eyes, the bee is able to survey large spaces, which allows it to navigate during flights.

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. This is a pair of complex organs of 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 beam 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 desired 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 parts of the image. 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.

A tiny insect-worker bee, by its existence, is capable of destroying our understanding of the world around us. This is especially true for adherents of Darwin's theory of evolutionary development.

A simple question - how many eyes a bee has can confuse many. All mammals have two, many believe that a pair is enough to see the world around them. Who remembers school course zoology can confidently say - the bee has five. Three simple, two complex organs of vision. An experienced zoologist may not stop there. Compound eyes - many sense organs, united according to the principle of honeycombs. The vision of an insect is very different from the human perception of the world.

A few words about the sense organs

Speaking of bees, ordinary person many things will seem strange in her senses. They are very different from the usual view. The insect perceives smells with the help of antennae. Even with total darkness with the help of antennae, she is well oriented in space.

The insect feels the touch with the help of paws. Drones have several times more touch receptors than workers. taste buds except for the pharynx are scattered throughout the body.

Hears an insect with the help of hairs located both on the paws and on other parts of the body.

It has sense organs inaccessible to man. Atmospheric humidity, temperature, amount of carbon dioxide. It is difficult to say what she still perceives and can analyze.

Interesting! The most amazing thing is the organs of vision.

Features of bee eyes

If you look closely at the insect carefully under a microscope, you can see three small dots on its head. They are on the top of the head. The question immediately arises - why three and why they are needed. The construction of these organs of vision strongly resembles the eyes of more highly organized animals. Clear lenses, which focus the image on the nerve ending. It is believed that with the help of this triple, the bee forms the spatial arrangement of objects. A kind of, individual frames add up to a stereo image. In addition, they help to navigate in complete darkness.

The large pair located on the sides of the head, what we usually perceive as real eyes, are actually complex visual senses, consisting of a thousand elements. This is the so-called compound eye. They are arranged as separate honeycombs. Each cell of such an organ sees its own piece of the object, and as a result, the bee receives a very complex picture of perception, but very informative about the structure of the surrounding world.

The bee surprises don't end there. The bee has a complex family structure and each species has its own vision.

1. The queen bee has simple eyes on its forehead. Complex ones are located on the sides of the head and consist of 4 thousand pairs of fragments.
2. The worker bee has simple eyes located on the crown of the head. Compound eyes already consist of 5,000 pairs of fragments, but are smaller than those of the uterus.
3. The bumblebee has simple eyes again on the crown. But the complex ones are so large that they practically converge on the crown of the head and consist of 10 thousand elements each.

Why do bees need simple and compound eyes, what is their purpose. We find the answer from the way of life of the insect. As already noted, simple eyes are responsible for orientation in space. With their help, the insect sees in the dark. complex organ at honey bee, consisting of many primitive eyes, is responsible for the perception of a complex spatial object as one whole. It allows you to fix even objects that are in continuous vibration at high speed.

Interesting! Compound eyes form the so-called faceted vision in insects. The individual images received by each cell are added to a single mosaic, and the bee sees the object in its entirety, even when moving quickly.

Drones have even more complex eyes. 8000 facets make it easy to determine the position of the uterus during the courtship flight.

It has been established that bees distinguish 10 times more flashes of light per second than humans. When for us their flapping wings merge into one whole, they see the measured movement of each wing. This feature of vision allows the proboscis to be positioned on the fly so that it is precisely aimed at the droplets of nectar of a swaying flower.

Important! Working with hives is not to be done sudden movements. A bee can react sharply and release a sting, which will be quite unpleasant. Such is the nature of her vision.

Let's see through the eyes of bees

Another feature of bee vision is what colors they distinguish. The spectrum of color perception is strongly shifted towards short waves. If you imagine that there is an engineer who will make an infrared device for an insect, she will not see anything. Red color is not available for her. On the contrary, she sees shades of purple much better than a man. Flowers for her are painted in a completely different way. The poppy field is most likely perceived as a purple glade.

Important! When building hives, beekeepers must take into account the peculiarities of the bee's vision. Do not paint houses red. Usually their color is made based on the preference of the bee.

Since ancient times, man has been using the result of the labor of these insects. In addition to honey, it receives such useful things as propolis, pollen, wax. Pharmacists have learned to use bee venom for a long time.

The question about the number of eyes a bee has and what kind of vision it has is not just rhetorical. For practical beekeeping, it is important to know the characteristics of your wards. Therefore, scientists who are called apidologists study the structure of the eye not just out of curiosity. This has a great practical value and not only in beekeeping.

So faceted vision technologies have found wide application in robotics. It is easier to shift this vision technology to digital and implement it with the help of artificial material. To a large extent, artificial intelligence is built on a faceted perception of the world.

23.12.2016 0

How many eyes does a bee have and what spectrum of color vision does it have? You will learn the answer to this question from our review.

Bees have eyes too

Honey bees, like other living things, have visual system. The world through the eyes of a bee is not as clear as, for example, through the eyes of a person or a dog, but she sees it - and this is a fact. Without eyes, the insect could not fly from flower to flower and collect delicious nectar. How many eyes does a bee have? Only five:

• three simple;
• two difficult ones.

On the sides of the head are two large complex eyes, consisting of a whole set of facets (facets are such cells). Their number can be different - the larger the individual, the more cells in the compound eye. Due to this structure, the bee sees objects as mosaic pictures, consisting of a set of individual dots. In the drone, there are twice as many cells in the compound eye as in the uterus.

The simple eyes of the bee are on the crown of the head. They look like small dots, connecting which you get a triangle. The role of simple eyes is auxiliary, that is, they perceive not objects, but the intensity of lighting. They give the insect information about what time of day it is.

Yes, the features of the bee's vision make it possible to recreate only a fairly fuzzy, blurry image. But it turns out to be voluminous and large-scale - this allows the bee to cover quite a significant space during the flight. Nature has endowed the insect with two types of eyes not by chance - they complement each other, making the picture realistic, complete and understandable.

color vision

In addition, bees have a well developed color vision- this is not the case with any of the other insects. Color visual spectrum:

1. Blue.
2. Yellow.
3. Green.
4. Orange.
5. White.

Insects can distinguish between polarized rays (such as the blue sky emits). At the same time, the red eyes of the bee do not differ from black in any way, and green and orange are perceived as shades of yellow.

The special device of the eyes allows the insect to perceive objects in volume, but they see the shape in different ways - the bee poorly differentiates different geometric figures, and perceives flowers and other objects that have the shape of a flower quite normally. An insect sees moving objects better, stationary objects are of less interest to it.

That is why when processing hives and just when communicating with bees, you need to make as few sudden movements as possible - in calm state she is not interested in a person, but she perceives a moving person as a source of aggression.

What are the main features of the color spectrum of vision in the honey bee? Let's say right away - the system itself is completely different for a person. In bees, it is no better and no worse, but it provides the current needs of the insect as fully as possible.

The color label turns out to be quite eloquent - all due to the fact that nectar indicators almost always have a strong, very special smell (that is, individual parts of the flower do not smell the same as the flower as a whole). The optical nectar index acts as an "aromatic index". A person inhales the aroma of a flower and does not even think about how many particles it consists of.

Bees perceive the smell more spatially, highlighting individual notes and using the information received to collect pollen or nectar. If a person saw a flower in the same way as a bee sees it, he would be surprised how many varieties exist with excellent nectar indicators. Moreover, the bee detects these indicators immediately, but the human eye does not, since it does not perceive the ultraviolet spectrum of radiation.

To roughly imagine the picture, take a photo of the plant through three filters in accordance with the colors perceived by the insect.

Video: incredible bees.

The world through the eyes of a bee

We have already found out that a bee has eyes, there are only five of them, and it sees pictures like a mosaic. Let's see how an insect generally perceives the world around it:

• with simple eyes, the bee determines the degree of illumination;
• she needs compound eyes for a clear recognition of objects and orientation in space;
• she sees a hive if it is painted in the color that the visual system recognizes.

Do you want insects not to wander in search of a bee hive? Color their houses blue, green, yellow, orange, or white.

There are as many individual eyes in one eye as there are total hexagons on its surface. Each individual eye (another name is ommatidium) is formed by a bundle of cells in a thin border. The cells have an elongated shape, and the borders are connected to each other into an axis, where they are processed. In the lateral parts, each ommatidium is separated from the other by pigment cells.

Separate eyes register only rays running parallel to its axis. Deviations from this direction are possible, but quite insignificant. In the visual system of a bee, it is ommatidia that play important role, but they are not able to give a clear image - one that a person sees. The picture seems to be divided by a raster into a set of separate dots.

The arrangement of ommatidia described above provides normal observation of those objects that are moving, and not at rest. In this case, the light is perceived by the cells of the eye in turn - the stimuli mutually reinforce each other, that is, a chain reaction is triggered.

Interestingly, in worker bees and queens, simple eyes are very small and are located on the crown of the head, but in the drone they will be on the forehead and are quite large.

Bright sunny day. Above the green meadow - silence and expanse. Hold your breath and you will hear a monotonous hum. Bees work tirelessly nearby, not leaving their attention to any seemingly nondescript flower. It's amazing how well organized these mysterious insects are. Behind short summer they need to collect nectar and pollen in enough to provide food for the entire bee colony.

Beekeepers use all the waste products of bees:

1. propolis;
2. royal jelly;
3. collected pollen;
4. bee venom;
5. wax;
6. subpestilence (dead insects).

How many eyes does a bee have

All insects have a surprisingly complex structure. visual organs. A pair of bulging eyes are immediately visible on the sides of the head. This is compound eyes.

But bee vision is not limited to this organ. At the top of the head there is a triangle formed from three spots. These are three simple eyes. Now you can answer the question of how many eyes a bee has: as many as five pieces.

Why do bees have so many eyes?

In a bee family there is a strict hierarchy:

1. working individuals;
2. queen bee;
3. drones.

They differ in the structure of organs, including visual ones.

working individual has a triangular head, its compound eyes, consisting of five thousand segments, are located on the sides of a black triangle of simple eyes on the crown.

On the rounded head of the uterus, simple eyes are located on the forehead, faceted ones are larger than those of a worker bee, but the number of segments is smaller, up to four thousand. She does not have to fly around large spaces, her main life passes in the darkness of the hive.

The life of drones is easier and sweeter than that of workers. They don't need to early morning search for nectar until late in the evening. And their vision is even more complicated.. Their compound eyes are the largest and consist of ten thousand fragments. Simple eyes are located, like a uterus, on the forehead. The task of the drones is to find the hive and climb into it in order to perform the functions of procreation and provide themselves with both a table and a house.

So, knowing the location of the eyes of bees, you can determine which of three categories includes the captured insect.

Three simple eyes allow the insect to get a clear picture of nearby objects. These eyes are like simple lenses protruding above the surface of the chitinous cover of the head. The images transmitted from them are similar to each other, like frames of one film. But they help to navigate well in a dark and cramped hive.

An enlarged photograph of a bee's head shows the complex structure of compound eyes, for protection they are covered with a chitinous shell, on top of which there is a crystalline formation resembling a honeycomb. From each eye there is a tapering tube with a completely black surface to absorb light, at the end of the tube there are nerve endings.

The structure of compound eyes

Each fragment is a tiny eye, which transmits a slice of the image. The picture they paint is blurry and blurry. It is believed that the image coming from these organs of vision is collected as a mosaic picture. But thanks to the facets, the bee covers a wide area during flights. When the compound eyes of an insect were glued during the experiments, they behaved like blind people. Human vision is similar to the vision of bees, but we see, rather, the created image of the object, and insects collect detailed information from individual pieces of the visual mosaic.

Surprisingly, these eyes also distinguish colors in different ways. The world bees see in various shades of blue, green, yellow, white and purple. But red, like black, they do not catch. But their simple eyes see the ultraviolet spectrum. It is believed that simple eyes help the bee to distinguish between dawn and dusk. Flower petals are covered with a magnificent pattern of colors inaccessible to humans in the ultraviolet range, which indicates the way for insects to nectar.

According to one opinion, the bee distinguishes movement well, so you should not frighten the insect, causing its aggressive reaction. And according to another version, the bee does not see moving objects well, so it flies closer to see ...

Insects do not distinguish the shape of objects so well. It is best if the object resembles a flower, and geometric shapes do not cause interest.

Insects see polarized light- light propagating in one direction, which occurs when reflected from glasses, water surfaces or crystals. Therefore, they see obstacles well and orient themselves in space.