Meeting Abstract
Insects are capable of rapid sensorimotor responses to mitigate severe flight perturbations. Although the visual system of honey bees has been well-studied in the context of flight navigation, it is unclear how vision is used over short timescales for reactive flight control. In this study, we investigated the latency and bandwidth of the compound eye visual system in tethered honey bees (Apis mellifera) by simulating egomotion about the yaw-axis using a custom LED arena. Six simple 90-degree rotations of the visual field, ranging from 250°s-1 to 1500°s-1, were presented in random order. Two complex oscillating visual patterns, constructed using the sum of sine waves generated at logarithmically-spaced frequencies of prime multiples, were presented to evaluate the optomotor response between 0.65 and 30 hz. High-speed videography recorded wing and head kinematics in the horizontal plane. Bees responded to the 90-degree rotations using asymmetric stroke amplitude, presumably to generate a yaw moment opposing the perceived rotation, and head rotation in the direction of the moving visual field. The optomotor latency of wing and head kinematics was 47 msec on average, and did not differ across rotation velocity. The amplitude of the wing and head kinematics response was inversely related to rotation velocity. During the sum of sines visual perturbation, bees exhibited wing kinematics frequency response beyond 20 hz with increasing phase lag, however head kinematics response declined above 10 hz. Although the bandwidth of head kinematics may be limited by the available power of the neck musculature, the resulting reduction in gaze stabilization at high frequencies could be mitigated by reducing the effect of head phase lag, associated with optomotor latency, on optic flow.
