What's Out There?

[Mudhammam]

I know bees are said to see ultraviolet, and that our color vision exists within a very narrow space of the light spectrum... But I'm trying to figure out what it is we should take to mean by properties of the external world versus properties of subjective experience of that external world... There are some who want to make the whole gambit just a giant mesh of unintelligible particle stuff that has no real distinguishable structure until it interacts with mind, whatever that is (I assume bees must have something of it to see ultraviolet, on their view)... then there seems to be the more defensible position that matter has its form, but the human/animal experience is such that involves the supervenience of mental states upon physical ones, so that an object we perceive like "tree" exists mostly in the form it appears to regardless if the specific time includes me awake or alive... and then I suppose branching off (no pun intended) from there might be those who say that colors are such properties that only exist in the mental side of things, and those who say that, no, the tree is green regardless of whether or not a mind is producing the sensation of green due to the surface properties of the tree and the particular wavelengths of light reflecting off it... so... Is there any reason to believe that colors exist outside the brain in any sense? Before animals with the capacity of vision, is it more correct to just imagine everything colorless? Or, more extreme, to not have existed in any meaningful sense that we can convey? Or rather that stuff existed just as it appears to, i.e. when I'm looking at it, and that it remains exactly the same when I'm not? Why or why not?