Insects are equipped with pairs of compound eyes, each made up of thousands of simple light sensitive lenses, which give a coarser view of the world than our eyes do.

Each light-sensitive lens registers the brightness of whatever is directly in front of it. A picture is built up from which the insect can detect the direction of objects in space. More importantly, it can detect movement very readily.

 

 

Bees can see the colours blue and green. They can also see ultra-violet light from wavelengths invisible to our eyes. Like us, bees see in colour, but because their eyes respond to a different range of the spectrum to us their colour picture looks very different to our own.