can bees tell people apart?

Yes.

SCIENCE NEWS reports on new research by Adrian Dyer of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.

Dyer, who studies bee and human vision, wondered whether an animal that had faced no evolutionary pressure to distinguish among people could recognize human faces. "I thought it was a long shot," he says.

He and his colleagues fastened a portrait above each of four feeders that dispensed either a bee-favorite sugar solution or a solution tainted with quinine, which bees disdain. The researchers borrowed some black-and-white portraits of men's faces from a standard test used to diagnose people with cognitive deficits.

The researchers put the bees through a multistep education in picking out a photo of a beardless young man. They put his picture above two of the sugar feeders and placed images of another face above the two quinine feeders. Between trials, the researchers shuffled the positions of the pictures and the solutions, keeping the sweet flavor with the one man's photo.
After one trial with a stylized face and another with an unfamiliar photo above the quinine solution, a bee had learned to fly to the first man's photo most of the time. The researchers then switched the unfamiliar photos, emptied all the feeders, and positioned the photos. As long as the photos were upright, the bees picked out the original fellow's face at least 80 percent of the time.

I'm not surprised by this, given research showing that bees have better working memory than researchers had thought.

The big question is whether bees can tell distinguish among photos of the same person with different facial expressions.

source:
Face Time: Bees can tell apart human portraits
Week of Dec. 3, 2005; Vol. 168, No. 23 , p. 360