Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Bee Sense

We humans rely on our five senses to interact with our world: Touch, sight, smell, taste, and hearing. Think about how differently bees may use these senses for themselves.

1) What different senses do bees use throughout their lives?
Bees, like us, use all of their senses throughout their lives. Some senses, however, are far more developed than others.

2) What are some of the ways these senses are used?
The eyes of a honeybee are compound, meaning each eye is made of many tiny light sensors that each makes part of the image the bee sees. Bees are sensitive to different colors in the light spectrum as well as UV. If you look at a flower under UV light, you will see the colorful stripes and dots that vividly stand out and look like perfect landing strips. They can also see polarized light, so they are able to tell where the sun is even when the clouds are thick.

Smell is a highly developed sense for honeybees. Bees have receptors all over their bodies that detect odors. They can tell the difference in the fragrances of hundreds of species of flowers. Bees use their sense of smell extensively to communicate as well. They use pheromones, odors which are chemical signals. When a colony finds a new location for a hive, a lemony scent is released to let everyone know that this is now home. Guard bees let off pheromones to sound the alarm that there are intruders. After stinging, bees release a pheromone that smells like bananas and signals other bees nearby to attack as well. Queen bees have their own special set of pheromones that are also very important to the hive.

Bees can taste with receptors on the end of their long, tongue-like proboscis. They can differentiate between sweet, salty, bitter, and sour. This sense is used to test potential food sources.

A honeybee has three different organs to sense sound. One is located in the legs, used to hear different messages through the comb of the hive. They also have “ears” on their antenna, which let them hear specific frequencies.

Bees use touch to measure and form the wax comb of the hive, as well as all the other duties of the colony. Touch is also featured in the bee’s “waggle dance”, an important communication of direction to food sources.
 
Bees have another sense that they depend on, called magnetism. Magnetism is the ability to read our Earth’s magnetic field. This ability is found in lots of different animals that migrate and have homing abilities including whales, dolphins, and pigeons. Bees use this ability to navigate and also to construct the precise dimensions of the cells of the comb. The honeybee’s sense of magnetism is more sensitive than that any other animal known.

3) Which sense do you think bees rely on more than any other?
Like any creature, every sense used by bees is important to everyday life. As highly developed as smell and pheromones are in a bee’s world, this sense is probably the most dominant.