{"id":1555,"date":"2026-09-01T10:55:06","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T10:55:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/09\/01\/bees-view-the-world-in-surprisingly-different-ways-understanding-this-could-inspire-new-technology\/"},"modified":"2026-09-01T10:55:06","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T10:55:06","slug":"bees-view-the-world-in-surprisingly-different-ways-understanding-this-could-inspire-new-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/09\/01\/bees-view-the-world-in-surprisingly-different-ways-understanding-this-could-inspire-new-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"Bees view the world in surprisingly different ways \u2013 understanding this could inspire new technology"},"content":{"rendered":"
An Australian blue-banded bee: different species have evolved very different solutions to the challenge of seeing their world<\/span> Kristian Bell\/Shutterstock<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One bee has long been regarded as a benchmark for visual performance: the honeybee drone.<\/p>\n

These male honeybees<\/a> (Apis mellifera<\/em>) have evolved highly specialised eyes<\/a> for detecting queens during mating flights. They are extraordinarily sensitive to tiny moving objects<\/a> less than half a degree across. In human terms, that\u2019s like spotting a person more than 250 metres away.<\/p>\n

Honeybees have dominated research on bee vision<\/a> for more than a century. But some of the most impressive visual performances measured in our new study<\/a> came from rarely studied, solitary species.<\/p>\n

While the honeybee lives in massive colonies, most bee species are solitary<\/a> so must do everything themselves: find food, locate mates, provision their nests. In terms of vision, several of the solitary species we researched outperformed honeybee workers in a number of ways, including the sharpness of images formed by their eyes.<\/p>\n

\n \"Close-up<\/a>
\n Close-up of a honeybee\u2019s eye.<\/span>
\n Marr Stock\/Shutterstock<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Understanding how these different evolutionary solutions work is important for more than just understanding bee biology. It could provide ideas for nature-inspired technologies, from compact visual sensors<\/a> to autonomous robots<\/a>.<\/p>\n

How bees\u2019 eyes have adapted<\/h2>\n

With more than 20,000 species worldwide<\/a>, bees show extraordinary diversity in lifestyle, body size and ecological role. Some live in open environments; others forage in dense vegetation or in dim light at dawn, dusk and even at night.<\/p>\n

Such remarkable diversity prompted us to ask the question: how have bees\u2019 eyes adapted to such different lifestyles and visual demands?<\/p>\n

Bees see the world through compound eyes made up of thousands of tiny lenses. These odd-looking structures are their main tools to navigate, locate flowers and identify important landmarks.<\/p>\n

Our new study<\/a> of some daytime-active bee species shows that even bees with similar-looking eyes can achieve impressive visual performance in surprisingly different ways.<\/p>\n

Male wool carder bees (Anthidium manicatum<\/em>), for example, spend much of their day patrolling territories and chasing rivals or potential mates through the air. This bee pushes visual sharpness to the limit<\/a> with its exceptionally small photoreceptors that minimise optical blur. In contrast, honeybee drones have evolved large lenses that maximise sensitivity.<\/p>\n

Video: David O’Carroll\/Lund University.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Australian blue-banded bee (Amegilla<\/em>) manages to detect small objects and see sharp images just as well without either of these extreme strategies. Instead, it achieves similar visual performance using a different combination of optical design and sampling.<\/p>\n

From the outside, the eyes of these bees all look very similar. But when we looked more closely, we found the size of their visual sensors (photoreceptors) differed greatly.<\/p>\n

These light-sensitive structures are a bit like the pixels in a smartphone camera. They sit behind the bees\u2019 tiny eye lenses, converting light into electrical signals. Larger pixels capture more light, improving sensitivity, while smaller ones can help preserve image sharpness.<\/p>\n

The challenge \u2013 for smartphone designers and evolution alike \u2013 is balancing these competing demands.<\/p>\n

Something unexpected<\/h2>\n

Looking at anatomy tells us how the eye is built, but not how well it performs. To answer this question, we recorded directly from individual photoreceptors in living bees.<\/p>\n

We used glass microelectrodes with tips just a few tens of nanometers wide \u2013 thousands of times thinner than a human hair. That allowed us, for the first time in these species, to measure the tiny electrical signals that single cells produce when the bees were shown tiny objects on a computer display.<\/p>\n

Our results revealed something unexpected. The diminutive Australian blue-banded bee lacks the enormous eyes of a honeybee drone, yet achieved a similar level of sensitivity in its photoreceptors.<\/p>\n

At first glance, this seems paradoxical. How can bee eyes built so differently perform so similarly?<\/p>\n

The answer is that evolution is not working towards a single ideal design. Different species have arrived at similar visual performance through different combinations of optical design, photoreceptor structure and visual sampling.<\/p>\n

Our findings show why it is important to look beyond a handful of familiar species. By studying a wider range of bees, we can better understand how different senses have evolved, leading to a variety of adaptive solutions.<\/p>\n

This is true not only for vision<\/a> but for other traits, including how bees respond to environmental stresses such as heat<\/a> and pesticide exposure<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Unique evolutionary innovations<\/h2>\n

Through our research, we are just beginning to appreciate the remarkably different ways of seeing the world that bees have evolved.<\/p>\n

Different bee species have evolved different solutions to the challenges of seeing their world. For example, the Australian blue-banded bee is a buzz pollinator, able to vibrate flowers to release pollen in a way that honeybees cannot. This makes it a potentially valuable pollinator of crops<\/a> such as tomatoes in Australia, where bumblebees are not naturally present.<\/p>\n

Such diverse evolutionary solutions may also prove useful to engineers. Designers of cameras, robots and autonomous vehicles face many of the same challenges as bees: how to gather enough visual information while keeping sensors small, efficient and affordable.<\/p>\n

Bees and other insects have been a fruitful source of inspiration for artificial vision systems<\/a>. In our previous work, we developed computational models<\/a> based on insect target motion processing that turned out to be as robust as alternative engineered solutions, with large benefits in processing efficiency.<\/p>\n

We have now translated these models on to an autonomous robot that can pursue moving targets<\/a> within natural scenes and even into autonomous flying drones.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, as bee diversity declines worldwide<\/a>, there is a risk that we lose not only species, but the unique evolutionary innovations that have taken millions of years to develop.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Elisa Rigosi receives funding from The Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsr\u00e5det). <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

David O’carroll receives funding from The Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsr\u00e5det) & The Australian Research Council<\/p>\n

. <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An Australian blue-banded bee: different species have evolved very different solutions to the challenge of seeing their world Kristian Bell\/Shutterstock One bee has long been regarded as a benchmark for visual performance: the honeybee drone. These male honeybees (Apis mellifera) have evolved highly specialised eyes for detecting queens during mating flights. They are extraordinarily sensitive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1555\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}