Seeing through a bees' eye: how do pollinators finds flowers in complex environments?

How we perceive the world is very constrained by our sensory apparatus, and how experience allows us to learn about our environment. Bees have a very different visual system to humans; including the capacity to see ultraviolet wavelengths, and images are constructed from a multifaceted compound eye. This system has evolved to become highly efficient at finding flowers in complex natural environments. So what do bees perceive? One hundred year ago the Novel Laureate Karl von Frisch showed bees can see colour, and recently it has been possible to reconstruct photographic representations of how bees see colour and spatial information. Furthermore, it has been possible to do testing with free-flying bees to understand how their visual system can do holistic processing, or enable face recognition, size comparisons, or even bind multiple simultaneous rules. Thus an insect brain with less than one million neurons can teach us a lot about how perception is a combination of both sensory apparatus and individual experience.