One bee has long been regarded as a benchmark for visual performance: the honeybee drone.

These male honeybees (Apis mellifera) have evolved highly specialised eyes for detecting queens during mating flights. They are extraordinarily sensitive to tiny moving objects less than half a degree across. In human terms, that’s like spotting a person more than 250 metres away.

Honeybees have dominated research on bee vision for more than a century. But some of the most impressive visual performances measured in our new study came from rarely studied, solitary species.

While the honeybee lives in massive colonies, most bee species are solitary so must do everything themselves: find food, locate mates, provision their nests. In terms of vision, several of the solitary species we researched outperformed honeybee workers in a number of ways, including the sharpness of images formed by their eyes.

Understanding how these different evolutionary solutions work is important for more than just understanding bee biology. It could provide ideas for nature-inspired technologies, from compact visual sensors to autonomous robots.

How bees’ eyes have adapted

With more than 20,000 species worldwide, bees show extraordinary diversity in lifestyle, body size and ecological role. Some live in open environments; others forage in dense vegetation or in dim light at dawn, dusk and even at night.

Such remarkable diversity prompted us to ask the question: how have bees’........

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