QBI researcher Dr Peter Kraft.

Families flocked to see the latest animated hit Bee Movie, but scientists from the University of Queensland's Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) have long embraced the bee for very different reasons.

Bees have a brain the size of a sesame seed but they are proving to be a model species to study for their smart ‘minds', their amazing capacity to learn and remember things and for their astute sense of smell and vision.

“Bees are the Rolls Royce of the insect world due to their amazing brain,” Dr Charles Claudianos from QBI's Visual and Sensory Neuroscience Group said.

The group is studying how the bee's brain works and how bees behave, fly, navigate, see and smell.

They have discovered that bees use only a handful of key compounds to discern between floral scents, which, like a perfume, can contain more than 100 different odorants.

QBI Senior Research Fellow Dr Judith Reinhard said bees' ‘noses' were their antennae which carried countless odour receptors to detect even the smallest scent molecule in the air.

Dr Reinhard said a bees' sense of smell was so precise that it could distinguish between hundreds of different aromas and also tell whether a flower carried pollen or nectar, by sniffing its scent from metres away.

The UQ team is working with the CSIRO to uncover how insects, such as the honeybee, learn and process scents to develop more sensitive electronic noses.