Honey bees have capabilities, humans lack.
(1) They respond to the polarization of light. The sky is blue to humans as some of the sunlight headed directly to your eyes is scattered sideways, and then scattered a second time back into a path towards your eyes. If the angle between the first and second scattered beams is 90 degrees that light coming to your eyes is 100% polarized. Common polarizing sunglasses are far from perfect polarization filters, but good enough that if you look at a spot in the blue sky where that second scattering angle is 90 degrees and rotate the polarizing glasses, you will find a rotation for which the sky is much darker - almost back, when seen thru a polarizer.
(2) The scattering intensity goes as the inverse fourth power of the wave length so the twice scattered shorter by a factor of 2 wave length light is 16 x 16 =256 times more intense than light with a wave length twice as long. Human sense a range of wave lengths but not a full octave. (Longest is less than twice the length of the shortest visible light.) Bees in contrast see more than an octave of light wave lengths, extending in to the near UV. Thus for them, the sky is not blue but a shorter wavelength in the UV.
The fact that bees are sensitive to "UV colors" is of great importance to both them and the flowers they pollinate. All the flowers that are white to a human, have many different UV colors for the bee. That is how the bee can go directly to the particular flower humans see as “white” that is currently rich with nectar, despite it being mixed in with a dozen other types of white-to-humans flowers. We can, and have, reflected UV light off various white flowers and thus know their reflectivity has strong variations with wavelength in the UV that gives them different UV colors for the bee.
If you want to understand the bee's brain, you need to know at least what two* high level tasks it is doing. Even if the sun is hidden behind a cloud the bee knows where it is by the varying polarization of the UV color sky it can see. One bee back in the hive has told others where there is rich nectar source to be exploited in a coordinate system that is based on the sun's location in the sky {and gravity's down.} Bees fly directly to place they were told to by the “bee dance” in the hive, even if the sky is mostly cloudy with sun completely obscured.
In compensation for humans lack of these environmental senses, bees totally lack any 3D sense of space / spatial vision. I raised a one hive colony of bees for two summers and the intervening winter. I did many experiments on them. One was to move their hive a little more than a meter sideways while most were out of it gathering honey. Soon a “bee cloud” of at least 1000 bees formed in front of the old hive entrance location. They used the inverse of the solar guidance / polarized light system to return to where the hive was when they left it. They could not perceive the large hive only four feet away! As they may have been away from hive even an hour, their brain corrects for the 15 or so degrees the sun has moved, and returned with high percision to where the hive was!
SUMMARY: If you want to understand the bee's brain, first you must understand what tasks the bee uses it for. An important task, I have not described, is processing of trace chemicals in the fluids they exchange in the hive. If you remove the queen, close the hive up again, so she would be in the dark if there, every thing continues normally for at least an hour, then panic sets in with very different activity.
I don't think anyone can know what a bee's brain is doing, unless they know much more than I do about what the bee uses it for as that is a very different set of tasks from what humans use their brains for.
* TASK of locating the sun when hidden behind clouds and TASK of specific UV color recognition. (Much like what humans do when controlled by a stop light.)
PS the hive is the bee life form. Individual bees are the cells of that organism. They form collective judgements, like when to swarm and others.** Thus the hive is a natural parellel processor of infromation. A trick they do with their tiny brain, that man has not yet mastered with his huge brain!
** Another is to form a "dynamic bee ball" when temperature is lower than a very specific value I forget. Bees in the interior struggle to reach the out side of the ball and those on the out side struggle to reach the interior. They keep warm by this collective energy consumption, friction making, effort.
If you can, raise a hive of bees, to learn about a more perfected social organization. Each bee has a task which changes with age. For example a few spend the entire hot day with feet clamped to the landing platform with wings beating to force ventilation air into the hive. I marked with flour one such bee before going into the woods to cut fire wood that had fallen to the ground. Four or so hours later, when I had my pick-up truck full I went back to the hive. My flour marked bee was still there, doing his job! That bee is a cell of the organism, much like your stomach, with a job to do for the organism's benefit.
To steal from the Charge of the Light Brigade poem: "His is not to reason why, his is just to do or die."
Other bees stand guard duty on the landing platform. They exchange a little fluid or smells with each returning bee - if OK that bee can enter the hive. Bees will try to steal honey from other hives. I have watched a hive guard check out more than a dozen returning bees and read several books on bees.
