Nothing seems more imperturbable than a bee in full flight.
Whatever the climatic conditions, it will manage to land on the flower it has chosen to forage.
However, if a smooth reflective surface appears, such as a puddle of water, a pond or photovoltaic panels, it will crash irretrievably on the ground.
An astonishing experiment demonstrated this, led by a French team from the Institut des sciences du mouvement Étienne-Jules Marey (CNRS/Aix-Marseille University) and the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology (
Biology Letters
, March 2022) .
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Belly dance of the bees
“Sixty years ago, Herbert Heran, an Austrian entomologist, and Martin Lindauer, a German behavioral specialist, had trained bees to fly over a lake
, explains Julien Serres, first author of the study and master of lectures at the University of Aix-Marseille.
This is not at all natural for these insects.
To achieve this, they had to build a kind of bridge that…
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