Dara Kilmartin Bee Vision

A lecture given by Dara Kilmartin at the 2022 National Honey Show entitled "Bee Vision". The National Honey Show gratefully acknowledge the Worshipful Company of Wax Chandlers for their support and the Central Association of Beekeepers for their sponsorship.

Bee vision is extremely well adapted to the key visual tasks required of honey bees: efficient flower pollination and nectar gathering by workers, queen spotting by drones and mating by queens. Honey bees have highly specialized structural and physiological visual features: an advanced form of the insect compound eye, a blue shift in the visible light spectrum compared to humans, ability to detect ultraviolet and polarized light and high temporal resolution allowing highly sensitive motion detection. Traditionally, the bee compound eye has been regarded as inferior providing a mosaic image with poor resolution. However, localized structural adaptations in the dorsal eye show a focal area of high resolution approximating human levels of ‘super’ acuity, and we still do not fully appreciate the functional importance of bee colour vision and ultraviolet light navigation.
Key questions remain unanswered: if bee colour vision is shifted towards the blue/ultraviolet region, why has no one proven that bees use ultraviolet flower markings in foraging? Why have studies shown a more than 50% loss of queens returning from mating flights to hives marked blue on white, features which should prove advantageous? Recent evidence suggests that bees navigate preferentially towards blue and green contrast, which confounds more than a century of perceived wisdom.

Prof Dara Kilmartin is a hobbyist beekeeper with 12 years experience managing 20-30 colonies in 6 apiaries between central and suburban Dublin, rural Wexford and a remote island in Connemara, Galway, Ireland. He is a Beemaster and was awarded the CFL qualification of FIBKA in 2016 following exam lectures in Gormanston on Bee Stings and Bee Vision. He is the Bee Health Officer of the County Dublin Beekeepers Association and is an active member of the Native Irish Honey Bee Society. He regularly gives pollen microscopy workshops and bee dissection/disease analysis and has attended most NDB short courses. Particular beekeeping interests include bee diseases, pollen nutrition effects on bee immunity and comparative bee vision.
His day job is as a consultant eye surgeon and Clinical Associate Professor, University College Dublin. He holds a first class honours Masters degree in Physiology and has subspecialty fellowship training in ocular immunology and retinal surgery.