How many ommatidia?
How many ommatidia (light-sensitive receptors) make up the eye of a queen / a worker / a drone?
| queen | worker | drone | |
| 1. | 4’000 | 5'000 | 8’000 |
| 2. | 5'000 | 4'000 | 8’000 |
| 3. | 8’000 | 4'000 | 5’000 |
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Correct answer: 1
The organization and anatomy of bees’ sensory organs differ greatly from ours. In bees, compound eyes are immobile and composed of many small lenses, or ommatidia, providing a very wide visual field of about 270° (in humans <180°).
The compound eye gives bees a very high processing speed. While the human eye deciphers about 24 images per second, a bee analyzes roughly 300 per second. This allows it, for example, to fly at high speed through a mesh or to quickly detect a moving object or predator. The worker has about 5,000 facets per eye to distinguish nectar-producing flowers at the tips of branches swaying in the wind or to avoid collisions with other foragers near the hive; the queen, for whom vision is of lesser importance, has only about 4,000. For the male, however, it is essential to be able to spot a queen from a great distance if he is to be the first to mate with her: each of his eyes has about 8,000 facets.
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