It was demonstrated that statistical analysis of bacteria colonies Fresnel patterns recorded in the optical system with converging spherical wave illumination is suitable for highly effective bacteria species classification. The proposed method includes Fresnel patterns recording followed by image processing and the statistical analysis based on feature extraction, feature selection, classification and classification performance methods. Examination performed on various bacteria species (Salmonella enteritidis, Staphylococcus aureus, Staphylococcus intermedius, Escherichia coli, Proteus mirabilis, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Citrobacter freundii) revealed that the proposed method achieved very high accuracy of over 98%.