Seeing a colour happens in a blink of an eye. Although for us humans, that’s pretty slow, at least compared with the bumblebee. The speed at which your eyes process colour images might seem pretty quick, but researchers at the University of London have found the bee is hard to beat.
Vision relies on special cells that line the inside of the back of your eyeball. One type of these cells – referred to as ‘rods’ – detects how bright light is, while the other – shaped a little more like cones – responds to different wavelengths of light to allow us to see colours. ssage to the brain, which takes about a tenth of a second in humans. This might not seem very long, but for bees this could mean the difference between finding food or being food. Their cellular chemistry is therefore five times faster than ours.
In the past, other scientists have studied vision in bees to determine how the world might look through their eyes. In 2007, a researcher at Monash University found bees? vision is as good as ours when it comes to recognising shapes close up. The scientist was able to create a simulation of what a bee might see when it looked at a flower. Since they are able to see ultraviolet light but not red colours, the world was presumed to look pretty different through their eyes. Yet while the colours were different, bees and people can see shapes in much the same way.
Speedy vision is incredibly useful for flying insects, allowing them to quickly receive information from their environment and make split-second decisions. Flies, for instance, hold the record for the fastest vision cells of all.
Given it takes more energy to see the world in colour and to respond quickly, rapid colour processing in bees must be incredibly useful, especially when it comes to playing the bee?s version of ?I spy?.