OF BEES AND MIRRORS?

Bees crash, but flies don’t. In 1963, Austrian entomologist Herbert Heran and a German behavioral scientist, Martin Lindauer, noticed something really very odd. If honeybees fly over a calm lake, the absence of ripples causes them to suddenly lose height and crash into the water. Dead bee. Worse, in an experiment created out to replicate this observation under controlled conditions, in a room with a mirrored floor, bees lost orientation after only about 40cm of level flight!

The problem, apparently, is that the absence of distortion interferes with an instinctive levelling system called ‘ventral optic flow’. Odder still, flies do not have this problem indicating that they use a completely different system to maintain level flight.