Honey bees have better vision than previously thought

New Delhi: Honey bees have much better vision than was previously known, according to a new study that paves the way for translating this knowledge into fields such as robot vision.

The findings come from "eye tests" given to western honey bees - also known as European honey bees (Apis mellifera).

Bee vision has been studied ever since the pioneering research of Karl von Frisch in 1914, which reported bees' ability to see colours through a clever set of training experiments.

"Among other things, honey bees help to answer questions such as: how can a tiny brain of less than a million neurons achieve complex processes, and what are its utmost limits?" said Elisa Rigosi from Lund University in Sweden.

"In the last few decades it has been shown that bees can see and categorise objects and learn concepts through vision, such as the concept of 'symmetric' and 'above and below'," said Rigosi.

"Previous researchers have measured the visual acuity of bees, but most of these experiments have been conducted in the dark," said Steven Wiederman from University of Adelaide in Australia.

"Bright daylight and dark laboratories are two completely different environments, resulting in anatomical and physiological changes in the resolution of the eye," said Wiederman.

Researchers set out to find the smallest well-defined object that a bee can see and second, how far away it can see.

To do so, the researchers took electrophysiological recordings of the neural responses occurring in single photoreceptors in a bee's eyes.

The photoreceptors are detectors of light in the retina, and each time an object passes into the field of vision, it registers a neural response.

(With Agency inputs)