Antennae Ensure Smooth Landings

honeybee flying to purple, white and yellow flower in close up photo during the day

Biological Strategy

Honeybees

AskNature Team

Image: Pexels / Pixabay / Public Domain - No restrictions

Respond to Signals

To interact with its environment, a living system must not only sense a variety of signals, but also respond to them. To be energy- and material-efficient, those responses must be appropriate to the signal. This generally requires sensing thresholds to trigger an appropriate level of response (for example, hiding under a shrub versus running away to avoid a predator). Response strategies are tied to a specific signal and often have a response threshold, which determines how strong a signal must be to warrant expending energy to respond. One example is a plant that lives in arid regions in South Africa. Its seed capsules remain closed until rainfall triggers them to open to release the seeds. But the plant only responds to a second rainfall, thus protecting against releasing its seeds before there is enough sustained water for them to grow.

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Navigate Through Air

Although free from many of the physical obstructions found on land and in water, organisms that move through the air must still avoid hitting each other and objects in their flight path, such as trees and mountains. They also need to navigate from one place to another, which presents a different challenge. They use one strategy to navigate around obstructions and another to move towards their destination. For example, bats use echolocation to detect both obstacles and prey. To navigate during migration, bats also use vision, sun orientation, and likely other strategies.

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Sense Body Awareness

Sometimes, it is important for organisms to be aware of their body motions, where they and their body parts are in relation to objects or organisms around them, and internal signals that indicate how they are physically feeling (such as hungry or sick). This is more complicated than simply sensing touch or pain; it requires being aware of positions and internal sensations by gathering and processing many cues simultaneously. For example, a vulture in flight must take in many internal and external cues to be aware of and maintain its position in the air. These cues can include its internal sense of balance, visual cues, and how air currents feel on its wings, face, and other feathers.

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Sense Balance/Orientation

Living systems must maneuver, remain in position, detect differences in weight, and find direction. This often requires more than visual cues, and so living systems have strategies for sensing balance and orientation from both internal and external cues. Once balance or orientation is detected, living systems must make the adjustments necessary to maintain position and direction. For example, sea slugs use neural mechanisms to detect and align themselves at an angle to the earth’s north-south magnetic axis.

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Insects

Class Insecta (“an insect”): Flies, ants, beetles, cockroaches, fleas, dragonflies

Insects are the most abundant arthropods—they make up 90% of the animals in the phylum. They’re found everywhere on earth except the deep ocean, and scientists estimate there are millions of insects not yet described. Most live on land, but many live in freshwater or saltwater marshes for part of their life cycles. Insects have three distinct body sections: a head, which has specialized mouthparts, a thorax, which has jointed legs, and an abdomen. They have well-developed nervous and sensory systems, and are the only invertebrate that can fly, thanks to their lightweight exoskeletons and small size.

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The antennae of the honeybee enable smooth landings by sensing landing distance and angle, signaling the body to orient appropriately.

Honeybees come in contact with a variety of surfaces throughout their day of flying and foraging. It has been observed that a honeybee can achieve smooth landings upon any surface, regardless of the angle or orientation of its landing. This means that the bee lands just as smoothly upon a vertically-oriented leaf as a horizontal one.

This smooth landing is attributed to the bee’s ability to evaluate and adjust its distance from the landing platform. When nearing a landing surface, the bee decelerates. Within a few centimeters of the surface, the bee hovers, using its antennae to sense the platform’s orientation. Once the bee is 16 miillimeters away, it adjusts its body based upon the angle sensed by its antennae. The base of its antennae remain at this 16-millimeter distance from the landing platform regardless of the platform’s orientation. Only the body of the honeybee adjusts to the tilt of the platform. The bee’s closest feet touch down first, allowing the rest of its body to follow.

This 16-millimeter distance seems to be the ideal placement for the honeybee to make contact with the surface with any one of its feet. The foot that first contacts the surface varies by landing orientation. A horizontal platform initiates a hindleg landing, while a vertical platform initiates a foreleg landing.

This summary was contributed by Ashley Meyers.

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References

“The most interesting finding of the present study is that, during the final hover phase, bees keep the distance from their head to the landing surface amazingly constant at a value of about 16 mm, irrespective of the tilt of the surface. Presumably, this is the perfect distance from which to initiate the final landing manoeuvre, namely, extending the legs for touchdown. From about 16 mm away a bee can just reach the surface with one or more of its appendages, be it merely extending the hind legs onto a horizontal surface, or grabbing an overhead surface by extending the forelegs over its head.” (Evangelista et al. 2010:268)

Journal article