How many eyes does a honey bee have?
Honey bees have five eyes, two large compound eyes and three smaller ocelli eyes in the center of their head. The two big eyes on a bee are called compound eyes because they are made up of thousands of tiny lenses. Each lens, called a facet sees a small part of a scene and, all together, the lenses form an entire picture. You can compare it to a tile mosaic where tiles of different colors are put together to form a picture. The three other eyes are called simple eyes or ocelli. They are at the top of the bee’s head in a triangular pattern and are very small. These eyes don’t see images but can detect light, especially changes in light. The ocelli help bees escape danger because if something is swooping down to eat them, the shadow created by the predator alerts the bee that something is wrong and gives it time to fly away. The compound eyes together with the ocelli make it very hard to sneak up on a bee.