How Many Eyes Does A Bee Have

Legs – The honey bee has three pairs of legs, six legs in total. However, the rear pair is specially designed with stiff hairs to store pollen when in flying from flower to flower. This is why a heavily laden worker bee is seen to have two golden pouches in full season. The front pair of legs has special slots to enable the bee to clean its antenna. Wings – The honey bee has four wings in total. The front and rear wings hook together to form one big pair of wings and unhook for easy folding when not flying. Eyes – Incredible as it may seem, the honey bee has FIVE eyes, two large compound eyes and three smaller ocelli eyes in the centre of its head.

Photo above taken by Graham Kingham, Devon BKA of a more close up image of a bee’s set of eyes The charitable object of the British Beekeepers’ Association is: ‘to advance the education of the public and beekeepers in the craft of beekeeping and promote the importance of bees in the evironment.’ We welcome a donation to one of our current appeals: Save the Bees or Apiary and Education

Do all bees have 5 eyes?

1. Bees have 5 eyes – If you’ve ever been brave enough to get up close to a bee, you may have noticed three black dots on the top of its head. These are eyes! Who knew? As well as two large eyes either side of its head, a bee has three ‘simple’ or ‘ocelli’ eyes on the top of its head.

How many eyes does a wasp have?

But those plants have ultraviolet pigments that call out to bees, and guide them to their pollen-bearing parts. There’s more: Bees, flies, and wasps typically have five, not two, eyes. Where are the other three, you might wonder. The typical arrangement is that big pair of compound eyes, with a little triangle of tiny ocelli between them.

An ocellus is a kind of elementary single-lens eye that doesn’t delineate form. But it does sense light and dark with great speed. Ocelli help flying insects control flight and detect trouble. Inset above right: The ocelli of a carpenter bee appear as the triangle of three black dots between its compound eyes. Directly above: The eyes of a paper wasp. The ocelli are the three black dots forming a triangle on its forehead. Spiders don’t have compound lenses.

Usually, they just have six or eight ocelli in two rows. Two of those are more developed than the others and can distinguish prey. These ocelli are hard for us to spot with our own naked eyes. We’re generally aware of them only when we have close-up photos. By the way, birds don’t have ocelli. But, like bees, they do tend to see things further into the ultraviolet range than we do.

And, like bees, they can discriminate faster movement than we can. A bird or a bee watching TV would see a sequence of images, where we merge those flickers into a continuous movie. That’s probably true for our dogs and cats as well. A subtle message lurks in all this.

Our knowledge, our science, all begins with our own sense perception. Meanwhile the creatures just outside our doors (or pets with us inside) – they live in another world entirely. We have a so-called scientific method that’s meant to free our knowledge from the limitations of senses and emotions. Do we succeed? Well, yes, to some extent.

But watching these complex co-inhabitants of our flower garden raises a warning against complacency. What that bee, working away in the lantana bush, sees feels and hears, would be unrecognizable to you and me. I’m John Lienhard at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work. Dragonfly on a twig: Note the large compound eye: just to the right of it one can make out one of its beadlike ocelli This episode was first aired on April 9, 2013 The Engines of Our Ingenuity is Copyright © 1988-2012 by John H. Lienhard.

Why do bees have 5 eyes?

Updated: 1st March 2021 People sometimes wonder ‘ How many eyes do bees have ?’ Bees have 5 eyes. As soon as this fact is learned, naturally, people want to know: ‘ why do bees have 5 eyes? ‘ The short answer is: Bees need eyes not only to pick up colors and UV markings in flowers, as well as shapes, but also to navigate.

• Thus the two sets of eyes are adapted to perform different tasks simultaneously.
• The two large eyes at the side of the head (known as ‘compound eyes’ ) are used for picking up shapes and colours in the immediate environment, whilst the three small eyes on the top of the head (known as the ‘ ocelli ‘) are important for navigation and orientation.

More information below.

Do bees have 5 eyes and 6 legs?

They have stocky bodies that are covered with many hairs to which pollen adheres. The honey bee’s primary value is as a pollinator of crops. Where they live: The most commonly recognized honey bee species, Apis mellifera, is native to Africa and Europe. Honey bees are not native to the Americas but were introduced by European settlers.

The first introductions are believed to have occurred in the early to mid 1600s by English and Spanish settlers. What they eat: Honey bees harvest nectar and pollen from flowering plants. They are not attracted to meats like the yellowjackets that show up at picnics. Behavior: Honey bees are social insects that live in large colonies. The queen bee, drones and worker bees all have specific tasks to help support the colony.

• The queen bee lays hundreds of eggs.
• The male drones’ main function is to be ready to fertilize a receptive queen.
• Worker bees do all the different tasks needed to operate and maintain the hive.
• Reproduction: The queen bee lays all of the eggs in a colony.
• At the height of the season, she may lay over 2,500 eggs per day! The queen fertilizes each egg as it is being laid.

The queen occasionally will not fertilize an egg. These non-fertilized eggs develop into male drones. Did you know?

Bees have 5 eyes and 6 legs. Honey bees harvest nectar and pollen from flowering plants. Male bees in the hive are called drones and they do not have a stinger. Worker bees are females. They do all the different tasks needed to operate and maintain the hive. Honey bees live in large groups called colonies. An average beehive can hold around 50,000 bees.

Honey bee collecting nectar. photo by Tim Knight More information: Bee and Wasp Stings Honey bee information Site

Do bees have a brain?

Science | Meet a Bee With a Very Big Brain https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/science/bees-brains.html Trilobites New research suggests there is a relationship between the diversity of a bee’s diet and the size of its croissant-shaped brain. Credit.H. Bellmann/F. Hecker/blickweinkel, via Alamy Published Sept.15, 2020 Updated Sept.16, 2020 This is Panurgus banksianus, the large shaggy bee. It lives alone, burrowed into sandy grasslands across Europe. It prefers to feed on yellow-flowered members of the aster family.

The large shaggy bee also has a very large brain. Just like mammals or birds, insect species of the same size may have different endowments inside their heads. Researchers have discovered some factors linked to brain size in back-boned animals. But in insects, the drivers of brain size have been more of a mystery.

In a study published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, scientists scrutinized hundreds of bee brains for patterns. Bees with specialized diets seem to have larger brains, while social behavior appears unrelated to brain size. That means when it comes to insects, the rules that have guided brain evolution in other animals may not apply.

Most bee brains are smaller than a grain of rice,” said Elizabeth Tibbetts, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the research. But, she said, “Bees manage surprisingly complex behavior with tiny brains,” making the evolution of bee brains an especially interesting subject.

Ferran Sayol, an evolutionary biologist at University College London, and his co-authors studied those tiny brains from 395 female bees belonging to 93 species from across the United States, Spain and the Netherlands. Researchers beheaded each insect and used forceps to remove its brain, a curled structure that’s widest in the center.

• It reminds me a little bit of a croissant,” Dr.
• Sayol said.
• One pattern that emerged was a connection between brain size and how long each bee generation lasted.
• Bees that only go through one generation each year have larger brains, relative to their body size, than bees with multiple generations a year.

This is similar to what research has shown in birds. “A big brain takes a lot of time and energy to grow,” Dr. Sayol said. “The more time they have to develop, the bigger the brain.” Looking at the bees’ diets revealed a more surprising tendency. In birds, “we know that species that have a broader diet tend to have bigger brains,” Dr.

Sayol said. The challenge of finding and consuming a wide variety of foods may demand a large brain. However, Dr. Sayol said, “We found the opposite in bees.” The biggest brains were in dietary specialists, such as the aster-loving large shaggy bee. Dr. Sayol speculated that a broad diet might be less of a challenge for bees than it is for birds, because all bees feed on flowers.

A bee with a broad diet can fly into a field and drink the first nectar it finds. But a bee with a specialized diet may have to spot its preferred bloom, with its specific color and fragrance, among a whole field of similar flowers — a task that might require more brain.

• Larger brains have also been linked to social behavior in primates and other mammals.
• But scientists found no connection between brain size and whether a bee lived in hives like honeybees or was a loner like our big-brained aster-eater.
• This might not be such a surprise, Dr.
• Sayol said.
• The sociality of bees is very different from what we understand as sociality in vertebrates.” In back-boned animals, being social means having to keep track of many other individuals.

But although a beehive is large and complex, each bee within it has a specialized job, such as foraging for nectar and pollen. This form of social living may not demand a large brain, Dr. Sayol said. Other research in wasps has supported this idea, Dr. Tibbetts said, and even shown that the most social bugs are the least brainy.

1. Highly social species have smaller brains because each individual is more like a cell in the body of the hive,” she said. Dr.
2. Tibbetts said that even for vertebrates, whether bigger-brained animals are smarter is a topic of wide debate.
3. Scientists know even less about what it means for an insect to have a large or small brain, Dr.

Tibbetts said, and the new research begins to answer that question. “This is a fantastic study,” she said. Dr. Sayol is returning to birds, his usual area of research, but he said he’s gained a new appreciation for bees and their brains. The study illustrates that no matter how much scientists think they know about brain evolution from studying vertebrates, those rules may not apply to the insect world.

Which animal has 5 eyes?

Kylinxia zhangi is a newly described euarthropod with five-eyes. It is was discovered in a Cambrian aged deposit in Chengjiang, China, and was recently described in the journal Nature, Kylinxia looks remarkably like a cross between two Burgess Shale animals, O pabinia regalis and Anomalocaris canadensis,

1. The Burgess Shale is currently dated to 506 million years ago, while the Chengjiang biota is dated to 518 million years ago.
2. The two sites are separated by 12 million years but have animals that look remarkably similar.
3. During the Cambrian, the sites were also separated geographically, but are both interpreted to have been at low latitudes, most likely in the tropics.

Kylinxia, has five eyes like Opabinia, and they are arranged in a similar pattern with two on the bottom row and three on the top row. While having more than two eyes is not unusual in the animal kingdom, having specifically five-eyes, and in this arrangement is,

• To the best of the author’s knowledge, Kylinxia and Opabinia are the only two animals in the fossil record that currently share this anatomy.
• As an aside, box jellyfish, have 24 eyes, and perhaps more interestingly, no brain to process the information that those eyes are collecting.
• Ylinxia, also looks a lot like Anomalocaris, with two large grasping appendages at the front of its head and a circular mouth with teeth in it.

This mouth looks similar, in shape and design, to a pineapple ring. Click here for an image of Anomalocaris canadensis ‘ mouth It may come as a surprise to some readers that pineapple ring mouths and frontal grasping appendages are quite common to many different species in the Cambrian.

These traits have also shown up in the fossil record in the two proceeding geological time periods, the Ordivician and the Silurian. Animals possessing this anatomy are assigned to the Class Radiodonta (Greek for pineapple-mouth just joking. It’s Latin radius for ‘spoke of a wheel’ and Greek odous for ‘tooth’).

To make the naming convention a little more confusing radiodonta used to be known as anomalocaridids. The radiodonts were significantly bigger than most of the other animals of the Cambrian. For more information please read the academic paper published in Nature,H.

How many eyes do spiders have?

Spiders usually have eight eyes but few have good eyesight. Spiders usually have eight eyes (some have six or fewer), but few have good eyesight. They rely instead on touch, vibration and taste stimuli to navigate and find their prey. Most are able to detect little more than light-dark intensity changes which stimulate nocturnal web building, hunting or wandering activities and rapid movement to allow quick reactions against daytime predators (e.g.

How many eyes do flies have?

It’s springtime which means sunshine, picnics and flies. But this episode might make you think twice about reaching for that fly swatter. Flies are amazing creatures that have the fastest visual systems in the world, use gyroscopes for precision flying, and can see almost 360 degrees.

• To understand why a fly is so unique, just look into their eyes.
• A fly has two large eyes that cover most of their head.
• Each eye consists of at least 3,000 individual lenses called ommatidia.
• With all of these “simple eyes” flies can’t focus on a single object like we do.
• Instead, they see the world as a kind of mosaic.

This makes them really good at spotting quick moving objects like a fly swatter. And their field of view is almost a full 360 degrees. So no use sneaking up from behind. Dr. Michael Dickinson is a bio-engineer and neuroscientist at Cal Tech and a leading expert on American flies.

• On this episode he shares his love for flies and explains what makes them so special – from their eyes to their lightning fast neurological systems.
• So next time you might want to reach for that magnifying glass rather than the fly swatter – you’ll be amazed at what you see.
• Recommended links from Chris Morgan : Dickinson Lab Michael Dickinson: How a fly flies Understanding the neurological code behind how flies fly The Lab: Gwyneth Card + Escape Behavior THE WILD is a production of KUOW in Seattle in partnership with Chris Morgan and Wildlife Media.

It is produced by Matt Martin and edited by Jim Gates, It is hosted, produced and written by Chris Morgan. Fact checking by Apryle Craig, Our theme music is by Michael Parker,

Do wasps have DNA?

Wasp genomes are sequenced, revealing surprises – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Jan.14, 2010 BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – A consortium of more than 100 scientists has completed an analysis of the DNA sequence of three parasitic wasp species, and the project has turned up a few surprises in the process.

1. The genome project, described in this week’s issue of Science, was led by University of Rochester and Baylor College of Medicine scientists, with Indiana University Bloomington biologists providing key genetic findings.
2. Photo by Michael Clark, courtesy of the Werren Laboratory A Nasonia female is stinging a fly pupal host, injecting venom and laying her eggs within it.

The offspring will emerge approximately two weeks later. “We’ve gained a better appreciation for the diversity of genes that are found among the insects,” said evolutionary biologist John Colbourne, who led IU’s contribution. “There are likely 5 to 10 million species of insects and crustaceans on the globe that altogether show a staggering variety of methods to survive and reproduce.

• This project completes the initial description of the ninth distinct group of insects, and we find yet more novel features of the genome.
• Some can be matched to unique biological attributes.” Colbourne is the genomics director for IU’s Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics.
• The three wasp species are all members of the genus Nasonia – vitripennis, giraulti, longicornis,

And all three wasps sting and lay eggs within the larvae of agricultural pests as a food source for the wasps’ young. While digesting the vast information produced by the project (about 250 million base pairs per species, and tens of thousands of gene variants and proteins), consortium scientists found that the majority of Nasonia ‘s genes are shared with humans and other animals, while one of every five genes belong to insects alone, and roughly two of every 100 genes are singularly shared between wasps and their close cousins, the honeybee.

Evidence is found for many instances of “lateral gene transfer,” in which the wasps’ genomes absorbed genetic material from viruses, bacteria, and other Nasonia species. The scientists also identified a variety of important genes for the animal’s way of life – genes involved in the production of venoms, genes likely responsible for the origin of each species, and genes that regulate the action of other genes in modifying DNA by adding (or removing) methyl groups.

By investigating the gene and gene transcripts that ultimately code for proteins that define a wide variety of wasp cell types, the scientists have named 79 genes that could be involved in the production and organization of wasp venoms. The scientists recognized some of these genes as similar to those found in other venom-producing insects, but about half of the 79 candidate venom genes seemed unique to the wasps.

• The venoms of Nasonia wasps are known to have diverse effects on their targets – from ataxia to paralysis to death.
• The scientists examined the many subtle genetic differences between the three wasp species.
• They found distinct, correlated changes in nuclear and mitochondrial genes that seem to have occurred around the time of each species lineage’s evolution, suggesting the coevolution of these nuclear and mitochondrial genes could have played a role in the origins of each species.

The wasps possess a full complement of methylation/de-methylation genes, which are used to modify nuclear chromosomes so that target genes are turned on or off. DNA methylation was once thought to be the exclusive property of mammals, but discoveries of methylation systems in wasps, honeybees, and other non-mammalian animals seem to suggest DNA methylation is likely to be far more common – and older – than once thought.

1. Not all organisms possess the system.
2. Fruit flies, for example, don’t have it.
3. Nasonia wasps are used in agriculture to control insect pests.
4. An understanding of the wasps’ genetics could lead to tweaks in the wasps’ DNA that improves their efficacy or specificity for particular pests (leaving other, beneficial insects alone).

Nasonia giraulti and longicornis are native to North America, and vitripennis is found around the world. Nasonia is the second hymenopteran insect genus to have its genome sequenced. Apis ( mellifera, or honeybee), was the first. Like Apis, Nasonia females have two sets of chromosomes, while the males have only one.

• This split character in the insects’ genetic identities can actually make studying them easier.
• By isolating active genes in males, scientists can more easily determine the purpose and qualities of those genes, in part because there is only one copy of those genes present – no second copy can interfere with the expression of the first, nor mask its effects.

Just as importantly, the genetic systems of Nasonia and Apis simplify the breeding of genetically pure or near-pure lines. Nasonia differs from Apis in important ways. For one, DNA methylation in Apis is known to help determine bees’ caste status. Bees are true social insects, whereas Nasonia wasps live largely solitary lives.

“This project’s quality in the assembly of the data and in its interpretation really adds value to the larger pursuit of decoding the genetic basis for an insect’s way of life,” Colbourne said. “For every endeavor to understand why one species is special in any regard, the answer is found by comparing its traits and genome composition to those of other species.

We have some ways still to go for knowing how social insects evolved from the solitary ancestors of bees and wasps, or how species like Nasonia developed a parasitic lifestyle. But by continuing to assemble leading biologists from many disciplines to cooperate at analyzing and comparing these huge sets of genome data, we get a better handle on the evolution of these species – what makes them different and why.” Scientists from dozens of academic institutions and industry contributed to the genome project.

• It was funded primarily with grants from the National Human Genome Research Institute.
• Indiana University Bloomington scientists received support from the Indiana Center for Insect Genomics (Indiana 21st Century Research and Technology Fund), the National Institutes of Health, and the Indiana METACyt Initiative, funded in part through a major grant from the Lilly Endowment, Inc.

To speak with Colbourne, please contact David Bricker, University Communications, at 812-856-9035 or,

Do bees have a heart?

The Bee Heart – The bee heart, however, is quite different from the human heart. Like other insects, bees have an organ that runs down their back, from the abdomen into their thorax and into their head. This is the bees’ heart. The part in the abdomen is known as the dorsal heart, while the part in the thorax is known as the dorsal aorta.

It is effectively a single tube that contracts – pumping hemolymph into the rest of the body cavity. When the dorsal heart contracts, hemolymph is forced through the dorsal aorta into the head, from where it percolates down through the body into the abdomen – bathing the bees’ organs as it goes. When the dorsal heart relaxes, hemolymph is drawn back into it, to be pumped up towards the head again.

So, in the sense that the circulatory system uses a heart to pump fluid around the body, the bee and mammalian system share common characteristics. The bee heart and circulatory system, however, are quite different from the mammalian system. Read more about,

Do bees have teeth?

Conclusion – So in short, bees have teeth – or toothed-mandibles. These teeth are used in the same way that other creatures may use their teeth, which includes chewing and biting for a variety of different reasons.

Do bees remember face?

If You Swat, Watch Out: Bees Remember Faces (Published 2010) A honeybee brain has a million neurons, compared with the 100 billion in a human brain. But, researchers report, bees can recognize faces, and they even do it the same way we do. Bees and humans both use a technique called configural processing, piecing together the components of a face — eyes, ears, nose and mouth — to form a recognizable pattern, in the Feb.15 issue of,

• It’s a kind of gluing,” said, a professor of neural biology at the University de Toulouse, France, and one of the study’s authors.
• It is the same ability, Dr.
• Giurfa said, that helps humans realize that a Chinese pagoda and a Swiss chalet are both abodes, based on their components.
• We know two vertical lines, with a hutlike top,” he said.

“It’s a house.” In their research, Dr. Giurfa and his colleagues created a display of hand-drawn images, some faces and some not. The faces had bowls of sugar water in front of them, while the nonfaces were placed behind bowls containing plain water. After a few failed trips to the bowls without sugar water, the bees kept returning to the sugar-filled bowls in front of the faces, the scientists found.

The images and the bowls were cleaned after every visit, to ensure that the bees were using visual cues to find the sugar and not leaving scent marks. The researchers found that bees could also distinguish a face that provided sugar water from one that did not. BUZZING The path of a bee as it learned the configuration of a human face.

Researchers found that bees could also distinguish one face from another. Credit. Adrian Dyer After several hours’ training, the bees picked the right faces about 75 percent of the time, said, another author of the study and a vision scientist at Monash University in Australia.

• The researchers said that while they were biologists and not computer scientists, they hoped their work could be more widely used, including by face recognition experts.
• If somebody else finds it interesting and it improves airport security, that’s great,” Dr.
• Dyer said.
• The potential mechanisms can be made available to the wider facial recognition community.” Dr.

Giurfa said that the benefit of studying a creature as simple as the bee was in knowing that it did not take a complex neural network to distinguish objects. This could offer hope to technologists, he said. “We could imagine that through repeat exposure, we may be able to train machines to extract a configuration and know that ‘This a motorbike’ or no, ‘This is rather a dog,’ ” he said.

• But while the research on bees is interesting, it does not help with the most difficult problem technologists are having, said David Forsyth, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois, whose research focuses on computer vision.
• That challenging problem is to build systems that can recognize the same people over a period of time, Dr.

Forsyth said, after their hair has grown, or when they have sunglasses on, or after they have aged. These are all tasks that humans can usually perform but that computers struggle to replicate. “I highly doubt that bees can tell the difference,” Dr. Forsyth said, adding, “If bees did that, I’d fall off my chair.” Nonetheless, he said, it is important to add to the body of research on face recognition by studying animals.

While computers have become very capable at detecting faces, dependable face recognition by machines continues to be elusive. “We know almost nothing about recognition, but it is really useful and really hard, and it helps us make decisions about the world,” Dr. Forsyth said. “Research into anything about identifying and recognizing seems to be a good thing.” A version of this article appears in print on, Section D, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: If You Swat, Watch Out: Bees Remember Faces,

| | : If You Swat, Watch Out: Bees Remember Faces (Published 2010)

Can bees eat honey?

10 of the Most Interesting Facts About Bees & Honey

A single bee weighs,00025 pounds.4,000 bees together weigh only one pound. Each of our hives has 50,000 bees, weighing 12 pounds together. A single bee can produce 1 tablespoon of honey in its lifetime.683 bees fly roughly 32,550 miles to gather 5.93 lbs of nectar from about 1,185,000 flowers in order to make one 9.5 oz. jar of Big Island Bees’ honey! Bees can fly up to 12 mph. On every foraging trip, a bee will visit 50-100 flowers to collect nectar! Bees heat and cool their own hive to keep it between 93 and 95 degrees year-round. Bees are cold-blooded and must keep their hive at a constant temperature, In cold weather, bees keep the hive warm by swarming together to generate body heat and by sealing cracks in the hive with propolis. In warm weather, the bees collect water and line up in a circle around the hive entrance, Using their wings, the bees fan the water so that it evaporates into the air. They then fan the cool air so that it circulates around the hive as a sort of central air conditioning. A Queen Bee will lay 800,000 eggs in her lifetime! The queen’s life is dedicated to reproduction and she only leaves the hive once in her life in order to mate. Bees are remarkably tidy. Bees are very meticulous. They groom each other and keep their hive incredibly clean. The hexagonal shape of the honeycomb is the most efficient shape in our world. The pattern allows for the cells to be packed with no empty space in between. Though the wax is thin and delicate the structure of the hexagonal cells can hold a tremendous amount of weight. Bees communicate by dancing! Bees are known to raid other hives and steal honey! Bees “rob” honey from other bees if honey from another hive is available (say, if a beekeeper leaves a hive open), or if times are lean. However, if a guard bee from the robbed hive catches an interloper (detecting the foreign smell of the intruder), the two will engage in battle—stinging to the death. If the robber makes it into the hive unnoticed, she will gain the scent of the hive (and learn the entrance well enough) that she can come in and out without being detected as an intruder. A Bee’s diet consists of honey and pollen. Honey and pollen are the building blocks of a bee’s diet. Bees eat honey because it provides them with energy-laden carbohydrates, while pollen’s protein provides bees with essential amino acids. But, the Queen’s diet is richer in honeywhich gives her fertility. The queen’s staple food is a special honey and pollen mixture called “royal jelly.” Royal jelly contains more pollen and honey than larval jelly (the food eaten by worker and drone bees). The phrase “you are what you eat” is especially fitting here, since the queen would be infertile and indistinguishable from smaller worker bees if it weren’t for the added carbohydrates in royal jelly.

: 10 of the Most Interesting Facts About Bees & Honey

Do bees have blood?

Discover the intricacies of honey bee anatomy Like all insects, the honey bee is made up of three major segments: head, thorax, and abdomen. As a member of the insect class (Insecta), honey bees share with other insects the following characteristics. Honey bees are segmented in nearly all their body parts: three segments of thorax, six visible segments of abdomen (the other three are modified into the sting, legs and antenna are also segmented.

Honey bees have an exoskeleton, which is rigid and covered with layers of wax, but have no internal bones like vertebrates do. The main component of exoskeleton is chitin which is a polymer of glucose and can support a lot of weight with very little material. The wax layers protect bees from desiccation (losing water).

The advantage of chitin-containing exoskeleton also prevents bees from growing continually, instead, they must shed their skins periodically during larval stages, and stay the same size during the adult stage. Bees also have an open circulatory system, meaning that they do not have veins or arteries, but rather all their internal organ are bathed in a liquid called ‘hemolymph’ (a mix of blood and lymphatic fluid).

Bees breathe through a complex structure of network of tracheas and air sacs. Oxygen is vacuumed into the body through openings on each segment (spiracles) by the expansion of the air sacs, then the spiracles are closed and air sacs are compressed to force the air into smaller tracheas, which become smaller and smaller until individual tubules reach individual cells.

In the following I will discuss the important structures on and inside the honey bee body.

Table of Contents

1. Head Segment of the Honey Bee
2. Thorax of the Honey Bee
3. Abdomen of the Honey Bee
4. Historical Anatomical Literature of Honey Bee Anatomy
   1. Illustrations from Anatomy of the Honey Bee by R.E. Snodgrass
   2. Illustrations from Morphology of the Honey Bee Larva by J.A. Nelson

Source: Page text and photos authored and Copyrighted to Zachary Huang, Dept. Entomology, Michigan State University.

Can bees see in the dark?

Some bees do have night vision – Other bee species are crepuscular, which means that they are capable of seeing with little light. They fly during dusk, night and early morning to avoid the heat from the sun, according to bee research site,

Then, there are nocturnal bees, such as Lasioglossum (Sphecodogastra) texana, or the sweat bee, that can fly during full moons and half moons, the says. A specific type of forager bee called Halictidae, which lives in the highlands of Panama, has adapted to be able to fly even without the aid of moonlight.These bees gather nectar and pollen from specific plants that are only active during night time as there is less competition from other insects.

These night-flying bees have different eyes than those who fly out during the day. “Those bees have evolved that kind of neurological trickery to be able to sort of amplify the signal that each photon sends to their brain,” McFrederick said. “Bees have evolved complex ways to navigate in darkness,” he said. : Bee home before dark. Why honey and bumble bees can’t fly at night

Do bees have high IQ?

Scientists searching to answer the question, “How smart are bees?” have, time and again, uncovered breakthroughs that imply there’s a great deal more to this animal than meets the eye. Though their brains are the size of a grass seed, and their commitment to their hives simply a lack of individuality, bees are actually highly intelligent in areas relating to mathematics, communication, and emotion.

Can bees feel happy?

These winged pollinators appear to have emotions, but it’s an open question whether they subjectively experience feelings Credit: BILL DAMON Flickr

Charles Darwin once wrote in his book The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals that insects “express anger, terror, jealousy and love.” That was in 1872. Now, nearly 150 years later, researchers have discovered more evidence that Darwin might have been onto something. Bumblebees seem to have a “positive emotionlike state,” according to a study published this week in Science, In other words, they may experience something akin to happiness. To some, the idea is still controversial, however. Unlike humans, you can’t simply ask a bee to interrogate its own emotions and describe them. Instead, researchers have to look for evidence that the insects have the cognitive, behavioral and physiological building blocks that, when combined, can give rise to a complex phenomenon like emotion. Biologist Clint Perry of Queen Mary, University of London devised an experiment to do just that. He and his colleagues trained bumblebees to distinguish between a blue flower placed on the left side of a container and a green one on the right. When the bees explored the blue flower, they found a 30 percent sugar solution. But when they explored the green one, they slurped up plain, unsweetened water. Eventually, the bees learned to associate the blue flower with a tasty reward. Then the researchers tested the bees on ambiguously colored flowers at intermediate locations. Half of the insects were given a 60 percent sugar solution prior to the test, and those bees flew faster toward the ambiguous blue-green flower. The remaining bees that were not given the sugar flew more slowly. The assumption that an ambiguous stimulus contains a reward despite the lack of evidence is called an optimism bias. Perry’s experiment suggests that a bit of sugar amped up the bees into a positive emotional state, making them more optimistic that the flower would contain a sugary treat. Sound familiar? Something similar is true in humans—newborn infants cry less if they’ve been offered a sweet snack, and a bit of candy increases feelings of positivity and improves bad moods in adults, too. “Many of us view the world in a better way when we have a nice piece of dark chocolate,” Perry says. To be sure that the bees’ flying behavior resulted from their underlying emotional state and was not simply a sugar high, the researchers tested the insects on other, unfamiliar flowers in new colors. The effect, Perry says, was specific to flowers with colors that fell somewhere between the blue and green hues they were trained on, not for any other color. In another test involving a simulated predator attack, the sugar-addled bees showed the same optimism bias. In the wild, bumblebees are sometimes attacked by lurking crab spiders. To mimic such an attack, the researchers gently grabbed the bees with a sponge-tipped mechanical stamp for three seconds before releasing them. The insects that were given sugar water before the “attack” resumed foraging more rapidly than those that weren’t, suggesting their positive emotions made them less cautious and more optimistic in this situation as well. In a final experiment, when the researchers gave the bees a drug that disrupted receptors for dopamine, a neurotransmitter linked with motivation and reward, the bias disappeared, echoing the way this brain chemical works in mammals. “Many scientists, even entomologists, still believe that insects are genetically preprogrammed, rigid, behavioral machines,” Perry says. University of Arizona entomologist Katy Prudic, who was not involved with the study, also disagrees with that idea. “Because they’re built so differently, we tend to downplay their emotional states,” she says—”probably because we don’t see it in the same way we would with a dog or a cat or a cow.” There is no intrinsic reason that insects shouldn’t experience emotions. Feelings, on the other hand, are a separate issue. Even though we use the two terms interchangeably in common parlance, scientists use them differently. “Emotions are collections of actions, and numerous species have emoted,” says neuroscientist and philosopher Antonio Damasio of the University of Southern California, “though we can not be certain that they felt their emotings.” In other words, emotions are the body’s adaptive response to external events or stimuli. Feelings are the subjective experience of them. So on receiving bad news, your blood pressure might spike and your respiration rate might plummet. If you saw a mountain lion while hiking, your heart and respiration rates would both increase, your brain would be flooded with cortisol and adrenaline, and your pupils would dilate. These are your body’s emotional responses. And they can be, but are not necessarily, coupled with the subjective feelings of sadness or fear, respectively. The same seems to go for bumblebees, although Perry did not demonstrate that bees have feelings. “We didn’t show that they feel happy,” he says. The evidence showed instead that bees possess the cognitive, behavioral and physiological mechanisms that underlie emotions. “Feeling implies the presence of a mind and a mental experience, consciousness,” Damasio explains. “I have every reason to believe that invertebrates not only have emotions but also the possibility of feeling those emotions.” If insects have feelings, it would have tremendous implications for the way we think about these creatures, including how we attempt to control them as pests. For now, Perry hopes this research will simply encourage folks to see insects as more than just tiny, unthinking machines.

You might be interested:  How Long Are Cheques Valid For

Which animal has 10,000 eyes?

The quirks of mantis shrimp vision – The is a small marine crustacean known for the aggressive and lightning-fast ways they capture prey. Humans can process three channels of colour (red, green and blue), while mantis shrimps perceive the world through 12 channels of colour, and can detect UV (ultra violet) and polarised light, aspects of light humans can’t access with the naked eye.

The mantis shrimp’s is unique in the animal kingdom. Mantis shrimps, scientifically known as stomatopods, have compound eyes, a bit like a bee or a fly, made up of 10,000 small photoreceptive units. Some of these photoreceptors are arranged in a strip-like arrangement across their eyes so in fact they see their world by scanning this strip across their subject, a bit like a bar-code reader in a shop.

So, rather than relying on heavy brain processing to compare colours and determine what they are (as most vertebrate visual systems do), the photoreceptors interpret information straight away. Studying how animals like mantis shrimps see the world has led to a variety of now being developed in different laboratories around the world for human technologies and medicine. Studying the vision of mantis shrimps taught us how to make better satellite cameras. Image adapted from: Additionally, a large portion of photoreceptors in the mantis shrimp’s eye are used for visualising the UV and polarisation information in objects and scenes underwater.

Which animal has 12 000 eyes?

Monarch butterflies also known as the king of butterflies possess 12000 eyes, which helps them to see in all directions. These butterflies possess two kinds of eyes, that is, compound and simple.

Where are the 5 eyes on a honey bee?

Did you know that bees have excellent eyesight? This is because honeybees have five eyes! This may be surprising, as we know that bees do not rely on any eyesight when they are inside the hive. The inside of a typical beehive is completely dark. Since vision is impossible inside of a beehive, bees rely on their sense of smell to communicate, using natural chemicals called pheromones,

They also navigate by using the feel of their antennae. Outside the hive, however, it’s a completely different story. When bees are outside, they rely heavily on their sense of sight to find flowers, navigate, and survive – meaning their vision is very important. Luckily, bees have five eyes – including two large compound eyes and three simple eyes, also called ocelli.

The compound eyes are located on either side of the bee’s head, while the ocelli are arranged in a triangular pattern on top of the bee’s head. Compound eyes are what most people imagine when they think of insect eyes. They are made up of thousands of tiny lenses that all work together to make one single image for the bee – though we think they may see things more like a mosaic.

Bees’ compound eyes help them see color, movement, and patterns, making their eyes most useful when it comes to visualizing and identifying flowers. Honeybees need to be accurate at identifying colors to help them find the right flowers to pollinate. Curiously, the way their compound eyes perceive color is much different than humans.

For instance, bees can’t see red, they see more of the ultraviolet (UV) spectrum than humans. Their compound eyes help them see UV iridescence on flower petals, allowing them to easily identify flowers from one another. The bees’ ocelli, on the other hand, are simpler eyes that only have one lens.

They don’t allow bees to see an image but instead enable honeybees to detect the direction and intensity of sunlight. This helps bees follow the sun and navigate during flight. Clearly, bees don’t use maps or GPS technology to find their way back to the hive. Instead, they navigate by using the location of the sun to help them locate flowers, find their hive, and not get lost directionally.

This means it’s imperative for bees to have excellent visual sensitivity to the sun, and can gain a fix on the sun’s location in the sky. Drone honeybees and queen honeybees all have the same five-eye configuration. And while they navigate similarly to worker bees, they use their compound eyes for slightly different purposes.

A drone bee’s role outside the hive relies on them looking for a small target – a queen bee to mate, versus flowers to pollinate. This is why their compound eyes are much bigger than that of the worker honeybee. Once drone honeybees arrive at a drone congregation area, they use these enormous compound eyes to help them find suitable virgin queens to mate with.

A queen bee’s eyes are not as big as a drones’ however. Queen honeybees also use their five eyes for navigation, mating, and finding their way home. Once a Wildflower Meadows queen returns home from her mating flight, she uses her compound eyes to find her mating nuc, where she begins her life inside the colony as an egg-laying machine,

Do bees have 2 or 4 wings?

Is it a Bee, Wasp or Fly? – Kim Fellows As you’re puttering outside in the warmer weather, you’re likely to notice several different insects whizzing past you. Perhaps you’ll spy some alighting on blossoms in your garden. If you’re curious to know which winged critter you’re looking at, we’ve prepared a little primer to help you distinguish if you are looking at a bee, wasp or fly. Bees generally have hourglass-shaped bodies with a narrower waist between a cylindrical thorax and abdomen. Bees usually have more hair (look fuzzy) and are fatter than wasps and flies.

• Bees have two sets of wings (4 wings in total) although this can be difficult to distinguish, and they often – but not always – fold their wings along their backs when resting.
• Bees are vegetarian and only interested in floral products (pollen and nectar), so you will not find them joining your picnics.
• The fuzzy face of a bee usually features long oval eyes along its side.
• Long antennae are typical on bees.
• Bees’ legs are usually hidden when flying.
• Bees carry pollen loads on their back legs or underbelly.

Flies tend to have stout bodies with less obvious waists than bees and wasps. Flies can have hairs but they’re not fuzzy.

1. Flies have just one set of wings (2 wings in total) that are generally – but not always – visible at their sides when they are resting.
2. Flies are carnivorous, which is why they might enjoy sharing your food!
3. Most of a fly’s face is composed of its large round, forward-facing eyes.
4. Flies have short thick antennae that are often difficult for us to see.
5. Flies do not purposely transport loads of pollen, although you may notice particles sticking to their bodies.
6. Wasps have long slim bodies with a distinctly narrow waist, and are mostly hairless.
7. Like bees, they have two sets of wings (4 wings in total).
8. Like flies, they are carnivorous, so they will invite themselves to your picnic.
9. Wasps have smooth shiny faces that may have shiny or metallic hairs.
10. Wasps’ long thin legs usually hang down when they are flying.
11. Wasps do not purposely transport loads of pollen, although you may notice particles sticking to their bodies.

If you are interested in learning more about the differences between these insect groups, visit, And if you are interested in identifying bees, consider joining, Bumble bees are a good place to begin distinguishing various bee species, as most are relatively large. Other helpful resources are, and, Finally, you may want to check out or books by,

• **
• Kim Fellows is Pollination Canada’s outreach coordinator.
• Photo: Mining Bee,

:

Do bees have 360 vision?

The eyes of bees – The way in which Bees use their eyesight is really very interesting and still constitutes a source of study and much-followed curiosity to fully understand its functionality. Each bee has 5 eyes, Many Hymenoptera including bees have 5 eyes and this feature allows them to move easily with a view that reaches 360 degrees of angle. The five eyes are divided into two larger compound eyes located in the front of the head and three smaller ocelli located in the upper part. The function of these tiny visual organs is not to be found in the actual sight, as they are primitive eyes, but they help the insect to recognize polarized light, allowing it to remain in balance in flight guiding it along its journey. / p> The priority in their view is therefore not given by the color and shape of the objects and the visualization of these details takes a back seat. The ocelli also work in prohibitive weather conditions, and allow bees to see even in the presence of clouds or fog, providing excellent help to the insect for any type of movement.

Are all the bees you see female?

The Workers – There are actually about 60,000 honey bees working unbelievably hard inside of the hive, in various roles all designed to keep the colony (their family) thriving. Of the 60,000 bees in a hive, almost 99% of them are female! Female honey bees, or worker bees, make all of the decisions in the hive and do all of the work.

Skye Skinner