Related papers: How Honeybees Perceive and Traverse Apertures
Insects use visual information to estimate angular velocity of retinal image motion, which determines a variety of flight behaviours including speed regulation, tunnel centring and visual navigation. For angular velocity estimation,…
Flight is a complicated task at small scales in part due to the ubiquitous unsteady air which contains it. Flying organisms deal with these difficulties using active and passive control mechanisms to steer their body motion. Body attitudes…
In windy conditions, the air is turbulent. The strong and intermittent velocity variations of turbulence are invisible to flying animals. Nevertheless, flying animals, not much larger than the smallest scales of turbulence, manage to…
Insects excel in trajectory and attitude handling during flight, yet the specific kinematic behaviours they use for maintaining stability in air disturbances are not fully understood. This study investigates the adaptive strategies of…
Insects use visual cues to control their flight behaviours. By estimating the angular velocity of the visual stimuli and regulating it to a constant value, honeybees can perform a terrain following task which keeps the certain height above…
Honey bees make decisions regarding foraging and nest-site selection in groups ranging from hundreds to thousands of individuals. To effectively make these decisions bees need to communicate within a spatially distributed group. However,…
To effectively forage in natural environments, organisms must adapt to changes in the quality and yield of food sources across multiple timescales. Individuals foraging in groups act based on both their private observations and the opinions…
Approximately half of the existing winged-insect species are of very small size (wing length about 0.3-4 mm); they are referred to as miniature insects. Yet until recently, much of what we know about the mechanics of insect flight was…
Flying birds navigate effectively through crosswinds, even when wind speeds are as high as flight speeds. What information birds use to sense crosswinds and compensate is largely unknown. We found that lovebirds can navigate 45-degree…
It has been repeatedly reported that the collective dynamics of social insects exhibit universal emergent properties similar to other complex systems. In this note, we study a previously published data set in which the positions of…
We analyze 3D flight paths of bumblebees searching for nectar in a laboratory experiment with and without predation risk from artificial spiders. For the flight velocities we find mixed probability distributions reflecting the access to the…
The natural wind environment that volant insects encounter is unsteady and highly complex, posing significant flight control and stability challenges. Unsteady airflows can range from structured chains of discrete vortices shed in the wake…
Over the last decades, honeybees have been a fascinating model to study insect navigation. While there is some controversy about the complexity of underlying neural correlates, the research of honeybee navigation makes progress through both…
Bio-inspired methods can provide efficient solutions to perform autonomous landing for Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). Flying insects such as honeybees perform vertical landings by keeping flow divergence constant. This leads to an exponential…
The honey bee dance communication system is one of the most popular examples of animal communication. Forager bees communicate the flight vector towards food, water, or resin sources to nestmates by performing a stereotypical motion pattern…
Insects have long been recognized for their ability to navigate and return home using visual cues from their nest's environment. However, the precise mechanism underlying this remarkable homing skill remains a subject of ongoing…
The waggle dance that honeybees perform is an astonishing way of communicating the location of food source. After over 60 years of its discovery, researchers still use manual labeling by watching hours of dance videos to detect different…
A primary challenge in understanding collective behavior is characterizing the spatiotemporal dynamics of the group. We employ topological data analysis to explore the structure of honeybee aggregations that form during trophallaxis, which…
Hovering insects are limited by their physiology and need to rotate their wings at the end of each back and forth motion to keep the wing's leading edge ahead of its trailing edge. The wing rotation at the end of each half-stroke pushes the…
Flapping insects are remarkably agile fliers, adapted to a highly turbulent environment. We present a series of high resolution numerical simulations of a bumblebee interacting with turbulent inflow. We consider both tethered and free…