How does a bee’s sense of color compare to ours? Why do bees see ultraviolet light

BEE'S SENSE OF COLOR

Dr. Michael von Ryan has conducted many experiments to find out whether bees have a color sense and his results have been published in Bees, Their Vision, Chemical Senses, and Language, available through most beekeeping supply houses. Dr. Michael von Ryan found that bees do have a true color sense as he was able to train them to come to food on blue, orange, yellow, green, violet and purple cardboard. However, when he tried to train bees to come to food on red cardboard, they also landed on the black and dark gray cards, indicating that bees are red-blind. In other tests where bees sometimes confused yellow with orange and green and blue with violet, it was concluded that bees apparently see yellow, blue, green, and ultraviolet as four different qualities of color.

To compare the color sense of bees and man, the visible spectrum is shortened for bees in the red but it is extended into the ultraviolet. Man can distinguish red which the bees cannot and bees are able to distinguish ultraviolet colors that we cannot see. While bees distinguish only four different qualities of color, the average human can distinguish about 60 distinct colors in the visible spectrum and a trained human eye such as that of a decorator might be able to distinguish perhaps 70 or more colors. The comparison of bees to man, as in most cases, is rather futile since bees have a more narrowed interest in color (related only to food collection) while man surrounds himself with color for aesthetic reasons.