They can see: yellow, blue-green, blue, violet, ultraviolet, and also a color known as “bee’s purple,” a mixture of yellow and ultraviolet, but not red. However, there is evidence to suggest that bees can recognise human faces in general, or more specifically, the composition of a human face. You use the term “attack,” which is not 100% clear. They can see in the near ultraviolet. The way humans see the world is not the same as how other species on the planet see things. I also know that one cannot get a sun tan through the window because much of the ultraviolet light is taken out by the glass. It’s just that you don’t always know what that reason might be. The bees probably don’t understand what a human face is, Dyer said in an email. [1] An experiment carried out by a Franco-Australian team allowed us to observe this ability. “To the bees the faces were spatial patterns (or strange looking flowers),” he added. Although honey bees perceive a fairly broad color range, they do not perceive them like humans do. For more experimental uses of insects, see the Cockroach-controlled mobile robot and Bees may be keys to cooperative robots. A little bit further than humans and most mammals. However, there can other perceptions that show reality differently. "You see things in humans which you might attribute to having complex, mammalian brain, but until you go and test it in bees, you can't exclude the fact that a simple brain can do it." Not a huge range past what we can see. Bees can be trained to recognize human faces, so long as the insects are tricked into thinking that the faces are oddly shaped flowers, new research shows. Bees can see colors in the spectrum ranging from ultraviolet to orange and have been noticed to prefer purple, blue and yellow flowers. There’s a saying that “perception is reality”—meaning how we see things is how we believe them to be. They also tend to be drawn to symmetry , so there is some chance that a combination of bees’ preferred colors and symmetrical patterns could attract them to you. Read more about how Honey bees recognize people . Bees trying to count “like humans” Early in February, we discovered that bees are capable of adding up and subtracting, in other words they can perform mathematical operations. Bees and wasps can recognise people's faces – despite having less than one million brain cells, compared to 86,000 million brain cells that make up a human brain. A honeybee will never sting a person (or a beast) without a reason. It is my understanding that bees see the ultraviolet end of spectrum just like any other colour. A Study performed by Adrian Dyer, Martin Giurfa, and Aurore Avarguès-Weber, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology in 2010 , indicated bees were capable of recognising face-like patterns. 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