PhD student Emily Baird and her colleagues at the National University of Australia have discovered that honeybees have an effective way of maintaining their flight direction in the air while avoiding obstacles.
They can autonomously adjust their flight speed to keep everything moving past them at a constant rate. This enables them to modulate their speed and avoid collisions with other objects without needing to know where they are flying or how far they are from the ground.
Scientists have long understood that honeybees rely heavily on visual information for navigation, but Baird’s research team aimed to determine whether bees also use vision to control their flight speed, or if they depend on other senses to accelerate. They allowed several bees to fly through a straight rectangular tunnel and then moved the walls of the tunnel to create patterns that either matched or opposed the bees’ flight direction. The test results indicated that the bees automatically adjusted their flight speed to keep their surrounding environment unchanged.
“All they do is observe the speed at which the environment below and around them is moving past and simply fly at that speed. Therefore, in an open environment like a field, bees will fly high and fast, but when entering a noisy environment, they will automatically slow down to avoid obstacles,” Baird explained.
