It has been known for many years that honey bees are strangely affected when they fly over surfaces such as mirrors and stagnant water, where they can see their reflections, and lose their ability to fly. However, what kind of power was behind this effect of bees’ flight remained a secret. Until now.
With a recent study, the mystery of disrupting the flight of honey bees flying over reflective surfaces has finally been clarified. Accordingly, it was discovered that the bees could not realize how low they had descended on such surfaces.
It finally became clear why bees fall on reflective surfaces
In 1963, an Austrian entomologist named Herbert Heran and German behavioral scientist Martin Lindauer discovered a strange phenomenon in the flight of honeybees. They noticed something. By training selected bees to fly over a lake, researchers found that when there are waves and ripples on the surface of the water, honeybees can cross over to the other side; however, they observed that when the lake was as smooth as a mirror, the bees lost altitude and fell.
These findings then contributed to the idea that honeybees use visual cues to navigate in flight. With the newly conducted follow-up tests, a brand new perspective has been brought to this idea. Repeating the 1963 experiment, the researchers concluded that honeybees monitor the acceleration of the ground beneath them to control their altitude during flight.
In experiments conducted in a rectangular tunnel covered with adjustable mirrors, researchers observed that when all mirrors are turned off or when the mirror on the ceiling is turned on, honey bees can easily pass to the other side of the tunnel, usually maintaining a constant altitude. But the situation changed when the mirror at the bottom of the rectangle was opened, causing the floor to appear twice as far from normal.
The bees, which were able to fly without any problems before, started to lose altitude until they collided with the base after traveling 40 centimeters. The situation worsened when both the ceiling and floor were mirrors, and the bees were observed to decline after only 8 centimeters across.
Different species rely on different techniques to fly
The spatial orientation of these findings, sometimes experienced by human aviators, that causes difficulties in maintaining altitude when they cannot see ground speed The resemblance to the disorder was striking. Fortunately, we have the technology to help us overcome spatial reflections; but the same is not true for bees.
Noting that “Interestingly, our double mirror situation allowed us to approach the flight conditions of open sky flight above a calm water surface,” the authors of the study state that their results are in line with the results of the previous study. Put another way, the new research supports the idea that bees use visual cues from the ground rather than from the sky to maintain their altitude.
Regarding this situation, the researchers believe that when the ground is no longer a smooth baseline, the bees descend to regain their ‘ventral optical flow’. In other words, bees who think that the ground is further away than it actually is, do not realize how low they have descended, and as a result, they crash into the ground.
More oddly, another study found that fruit flies do not use ventral optical flow to control their altitude. So it kind of shows that different species use different techniques to fly.
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