Honey Bees have better vision than thought

Melbourne : According to a new study that opens new dimensions for robot vision has been found, Honey bees have much better than was previously known. These finding come from eye test given to western honey bees, also called European Honey Bees.

The vision of Bee has been studied since the pioneering research of Karl Von Frisch in 1914, which stated the Bees ability to see colors through a 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 categories 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 are determined to find the smallest well-defined object that a bee can see and second, how far away it can see. To see this, the researchers took electrophysiological recordings of the neural responses occurring in single photoreceptors in a bees 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.

"We found that in the frontal part of the eye, where the resolution is maximised, honey bees can clearly see objects that are as small as 1.9 degrees - thats approximately the width of your thumb when you stretch your arm out in front of you," said Rigosi.

"This is 30 per cent better eyesight than has been previously recorded," she said.

"In terms of the smallest object a bee can detect, but not clearly, this works out to be about 0.6 degrees - thats one third of your thumb width at arms length," she added.

"This is about one third of what bees can clearly see and five times smaller than what has so far been detected in behavioural experiments," said Rigosi.

The results show that bees have the chance to see a potential predator and thus escape, or perceive landmarks in the environment better than we expected, she said.

"Importantly, these findings could also be useful in our work on designing bio-inspired robotics and robot vision, and for basic research on bee biology," Wiederman said.