Compound Eye
Lexikon
Compound eye and faceted eye refer to the same organ: the two large eyes located on either side of the bee's head.
Compound eye and faceted eye refer to the same organ: the two large eyes located on either side of the bee's head. They are made up of several thousand tiny individual eyes, the ommatidia; in the worker bee this is around 4,000 to 5,000, depending on the source. Each ommatidium delivers only a small point of the image, and the sum of these in the brain produces an overall image that is coarse-grained but very sensitive to movement. Between the ommatidia sit fine sensory hairs that additionally act as touch organs and protect the eyes from becoming clogged with pollen.
Drones have noticeably more ommatidia than worker bees and queens; their compound eyes are correspondingly larger and take up a large part of the head. This is connected to their most important task: they must be able to spot the noticeably smaller queen visually during the mating flight, at great height and high flight speed.
For beekeeping it matters that bees fundamentally see the world differently from humans. They perceive ultraviolet light, but are largely blind to the red part of the spectrum, while recognizing movement and flicker much faster than we do. This affects, for example, which colors are suitable for marking hives or hive entrances, so that bees can reliably find their own hive again within the apiary. A common misconception is to conclude directly from the number of individual eyes that vision must be sharp; in fact the compound eye's resolving power is rather low, and its strength lies in fast motion detection.