Home▸Entomology & Insect Behaviour▸How Bees See, Smell and Sense the World Around Them

🐝 How Bees See, Smell and Sense the World

An explanation of the honeybee's sensory world — compound eyes and ultraviolet vision, the antennae's chemical and mechanical senses, and how these systems combine to guide foraging.

Entomology & Insect Behaviour3DAdvanced60 FPS

A honeybee patrols a small flower bed while its compound eyes render a low-resolution mosaic view in the corner panel, and its antennae sweep through a drifting field of glowing scent particles.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Compound eyes assemble a coarse image from many ommatidia, and bee-visible ultraviolet reveals nectar-guide bullseyes on petals that are invisible to human eyes. Antennae detect floral scent within a short working radius.

🎮 How to Use

Toggle vision mode to compare human and bee-UV petal patterns, drag the ommatidia slider to sharpen or blur the compound-eye view, adjust scent density, and change flight speed to watch detections accumulate.

💡 Did You Know?

Bees cannot perceive red at all, but their photoreceptors extend into ultraviolet — many flowers evolved patterns purely to advertise to bee eyes rather than to ours.

⚙ Under the hood

A 3D flower bed where a foraging bee's compound-eye view renders live as a low-resolution mosaic picture-in-picture, while its antennae detect a drifting field of glowing floral scent particles and petals reveal ultraviolet nectar-guide patterns invisible to human eyes.

bee-sensescompound-eyesultraviolet-visionantennaeinsect-physiologyentomology

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install