A honey bee's compound eye is built from roughly 5,500 individual light-sensing units called ommatidia, each aiming in a slightly different direction and contributing one low-resolution "pixel" to the bee's view. Bees also see a shifted colour range — trichromatic in UV, blue and green instead of a human's blue, green and red — which reveals ultraviolet nectar-guide patterns on flowers that are completely invisible to us. Overhead, scattered sunlight becomes linearly polarised in a pattern that circles the sun; bees read the angle of that polarisation as a built-in compass, even under partial cloud.
Karl von Frisch first proved bees can see ultraviolet and polarised light in the 1940s. Many "plain yellow" flowers to our eyes actually show a dark UV-absorbing bullseye around the nectaries — an advertisement written in a colour humans cannot see at all.
A flower meadow rendered through a hexagonal ommatidia mosaic shader, revealing the ultraviolet nectar-guide patterns hidden on flower petals and the polarised-light bands bees read across the sky.
Compound-eye vision is simulated as a two-pass render: the scene is drawn to a buffer, then re-sampled through a hexagonal tiling shader so each hexagon shows one averaged "ommatidium" — coarser than human vision but built for speed, not detail.
Switch between human and bee vision modes, shrink or enlarge the ommatidia to change visual acuity, move the sun to see the sky's polarisation bands rotate, and toggle the UV nectar guides and polarisation overlay independently.
Bees process visual flicker at roughly 200Hz — over three times a human's ~60Hz — which is why they can track fast wingbeats and flowers whipping past in the wind that would blur into a smear for us.