Find out why bees never crash land, and how their technique could help engineers to design new aircraft.
Whether landing on a picnic table, underneath a flower petal, or on a wall of a hive, bees always manage to touch down without crashing or tumbling.
Now, for the first time, scientists have figured out how these insects maneuver themselves onto all sorts of surfaces, from right side up to upside-down.
The bees' technique, which depends mostly on eyesight, may help engineers design a new generation of automated aircraft that would be undetectable to radar or sonar systems and would make perfectly gentle landings, even in outer space.
"This is something an engineer would not think of while sitting in an armchair and thinking about how to land an aircraft," said Mandyam Srinivasan, a neuroscientist at the Queensland Brain Institute at the University of Queensland and the Australian Research Council's Vision Centre in Brisbane. "This is something we wouldn't have thought of if we hadn't watched bees do their landings."
When bees approach an object, according to previous work, they steadily slow down to a stop by adjusting their speed as the size of their target steadily looks larger. Srinivasan wanted to know what happens after that.
Along with colleagues, he set up a platform that could be adjusted to any angle from horizontal to vertical and even upside-down.
Using sugar water, the scientists trained honeybees to fly to the platform again and again. Then, the researchers turned on the high-speed camera.
Their footage showed that no matter how flat or steep the surface, bees slow to a hover at 13 millimeters (about half an inch) away from wherever they're going to land. That suggests, Srinivasan said, that the insects are somehow using their eyes to measure that specific distance.
"We don't know how they're doing it," he said, "But they're doing it."
Now, for the first time, scientists have figured out how these insects maneuver themselves onto all sorts of surfaces, from right side up to upside-down.
The bees' technique, which depends mostly on eyesight, may help engineers design a new generation of automated aircraft that would be undetectable to radar or sonar systems and would make perfectly gentle landings, even in outer space.
"This is something an engineer would not think of while sitting in an armchair and thinking about how to land an aircraft," said Mandyam Srinivasan, a neuroscientist at the Queensland Brain Institute at the University of Queensland and the Australian Research Council's Vision Centre in Brisbane. "This is something we wouldn't have thought of if we hadn't watched bees do their landings."
When bees approach an object, according to previous work, they steadily slow down to a stop by adjusting their speed as the size of their target steadily looks larger. Srinivasan wanted to know what happens after that.
Along with colleagues, he set up a platform that could be adjusted to any angle from horizontal to vertical and even upside-down.
Using sugar water, the scientists trained honeybees to fly to the platform again and again. Then, the researchers turned on the high-speed camera.
Their footage showed that no matter how flat or steep the surface, bees slow to a hover at 13 millimeters (about half an inch) away from wherever they're going to land. That suggests, Srinivasan said, that the insects are somehow using their eyes to measure that specific distance.
"We don't know how they're doing it," he said, "But they're doing it."
By Emily Sohn /Discovery
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