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Bees give sight to flight

Bee flying into experimental tunnel - pic ANU

Bee flying into experimental tunnel - pic ANU

The dance of the honey bee is providing clues to help develop a simple visual system that would enable remote controlled airplanes and robots to "see".

Research from the Australian National University published in Science magazine has provided insight into how tiny brained insects like bees can achieve complex navigational tasks like flying and landing, and how this might apply to developing visual systems.

The research looked at how far the bee perceived it had travelled, and how this might affect its "dance". Normally a bee will go out foraging for food then return. If it has travelled more than 50 metres, it dances by waggling its abdomen, to tell the other bees how far away food is. If its journey was less than 50 metres, it simply turns a few circles.

Researchers have always thought that bees work out how far they fly by the amount of energy they use during flight. However, Professor Mandyam Srinivasan from ANU showed that bees work out how far they travel by the number of visual landmarks they pass, not how much energy was used. They navigate by seeing fast moving objects as close, and slow moving ones as further away, much like travelling in a car, where the trees on the side of the road wizz by, but hills further away move very slowly.

Srinivasan extended his experiments further from research done in 1996, which showed that bees travelling between tall buildings do their waggle dance for half as long as bees flying the same distance close to the ground. Presumably the high flying bees see the far away ground moving more slowly, so they think they aren't going as far.

Knowing this, Srinivasan sent honey bees searching for food inside a narrow tunnel 6.4 metres long. The walls were painted with a busy black and white pattern. The return flight from the hive to the food totalled only 41 metres, yet 90 per cent of the bees performed the waggle dance normally used for distances over 50 metres.

These same bees danced normally when allowed to forage outside freely on the university campus.

Srinivasan surmised that bees travelling so close to a fast moving busy pattern think they are travelling much further than they are. In fact, their optical odometer was thrown out by as much as a factor of 31 - six metres indoors feels to a bee like 186 metres outdoors.

Srinivasan said the work provided insight into how simple visual systems could be developed for computers. "The idea was to find out how insects can accomplish such very precise nagivation tasks, yet they have such a tiny brain," he said. The team aims to develop an unmanned, "seeing" airplane or helicopter within five years.

With sponsorship from the U.S. Defence Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) and the Australian Defence, Science and Technology Organisation, the research may ultimately guide new military technologies. "We are interested in exploring the possibility of developing autonomous, flying vehicles that incorporate some principle of insect vision to avoid obstacles, perhaps for surveillance applications," Srinivasan said.

Tags: science-and-technology, entomology, neuroscience