Excerpt from the 1991 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures discussing chemically powerful ultraviolet (UVA, UVB) light, invisible to the human eye (although harmful to human skin and eyes), yet visible and beneficial to bees (and other species) in their search for nectar and pollen.
For those species that are able to perceive it, ultraviolet light reveals instructional patterns and colours which the human eye sees only as solid colour.
Astronomer and composer Frederick William Herschel discovered infrared (heat) rays in 1800. Just a year later physicist and chemist Johann Wilhelm Ritter discovered invisible ultraviolet rays.
Isaac Newton's deconstruction of the colours of the rainbow is said to have caused John Keats to write Lamia:
Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine – Unweave a rainbow