Bee Landing Mechanisms
The mechanisms used by bees to regulate speed and land safely must accommodate for several shortcomings in their vision. With immobile yes and fixed-focus optics, they are unable to ascertain the distance between themselves and objects or surfaces. This is because they cannot estimate distances by measuring the amount that its gaze needs to converge to view the object, or monitoring the strength of refractive power necessary to focus the image of the object on the retina (Chahl et al., 2004). As well as this, their eyes are situated significantly closer than humans’ and thus bees have substandard spatial acuity (Horridge, 1977). Of course, bees have evolved to cope with these problems in order to enable efficient flight and safe, accurate landing.
As a honeybee flies towards an object, it identifies that the object is coming closer by comparing the apparent motion of the object relative to the background (Srinivasan et al., 1990). To regulate flight speed, bees maintain a stable average image velocity as viewed with their pair of eyes. They attain smooth landings onto horizontal surfaces by way of keeping the image velocity of the landing surface steady, which means speed decreases as they become closer to the landing surface, and is close to zero upon landing (Srinivasan and Zhang, 2004). |
Honeybee.
|