Meeting Abstract
Insects, such as honey bees, are capable of rapid maneuvers in response to turbulence and wind during flight. Although the visual system of bees is well-studied in the context of flight navigation, less is known about how vision is used for reactive flight control over short timescales. In this study, we investigated the frequency response of the visual system by tethering bees within a custom LED arena and simulating egomotion about the yaw-axis by presenting complex oscillating visual patterns. The visual stimuli were constructed using the sum of twenty different sine waves, generated at logarithmically-spaced frequencies of prime multiples of 0.05 hz, ranging from 2 to 35 Hz, and de-interlaced to present two separate patterns per bee. High-speed (5930 fps) videography recorded wing and head kinematics in the horizontal plane. The time-history of the kinematic record and the LED pattern were then transformed to the frequency domain to determine the bandwidth of the honey bee optomotor response. The power-spectral density (PSD) of wing asymmetry angle exhibited distinct peaks at each frequency presented by the sum-of-sines visual pattern; and, a strong response from 10 to 35 Hz was observed for angular velocity PSD. The head angular position PSD diminished prior to 10 Hz, with limited angular position and velocity power from 10 to 35 Hz. The high-frequency wing kinematics response suggests vision could mitigate flight perturbations approaching latencies observed during free-flight, while the low-frequency head kinematics response may reduce the effect of head phase lag and help maintain honest optic flow.
