Meeting Abstract
Finding back the nest is one of the most important tasks of a bumblebee to ensure the survival of the hive. When leaving the nest for the first time, foragers perform learning flights to gather visual information about the surroundings of the nest entrance. Bumblebees are using a saccadic flight and gaze strategy to restrain the rotational components of their motion to a brief time interval called saccade. During intersaccadic intervals head rotations were previously concluded to be either negligible, which facilitates the extraction of distance cues relative to the bee (Boeddeker et al. 2015) or to be small, but actively controlled by the bee to allow for gaining distance information relative to the nest (Riabinina et al. 2014). Our current analysis has been designed to reconcile these conflicting interpretations. In the experiments a bee hive was connected to a flight arena via a vertical entrance, and departure flights of bumblebees were recorded with two high resolution cameras. This arrangement and the placement of two markers on the head facilitate the reconstruction of its orientation during the learning flights. This allows us to determine potential points in space that may be fixated during the intersaccades. Analyzing the location of these points in the arena and their retinal displacement during intersaccadic intervals provides information about their potential significance for spatial vision and thus about the gaze strategy used by the bee during their learning flights.
