The good old bumblebee, known for scaring the hell out of you as it goes buzzing past your face, is now known as the King of Vision, thanks to recent research at the University of London. While the tried-and-true housefly still wears the crown for super-fast black-and-white vision processing, the bumblebee is the Overlord of Color Vision.
The lightning-fast color vision enables bees to zip through bushes and trees, escape predators, spot each other and otherwise deal with their world in fast forward. The trick to their fast vision is how many “snap shots” per second the color-detecting cells in bumblebees’ eyes take and send to their brains.
“The limiting factor is how fast the photo receptors can register a change,” explained bee vision researcher Peter Skorupski of Queen Mary, University of London. “So we measured the speed directly from the receptor.” In a human eye the receptors are the cells in the retina at the back of the eye.
“When we see something it seems instantaneous,” said Skorupski. “But there’s a lot of processing going on under the bonnet. In our case there can be a delay of tenth of a second before you register what you are seeing.”
