Meeting Abstract
Foraging flight of bumblebees (Bombus impatiens) requires stable, coordinated movement in complex aerial environments. Through previous long-term observation of free-flight in cluttered environments, we have observed that bumblebees employ stereotyped flight kinematics to navigate around obstacles: bees engage in rapid lateral movements (0.27 ± 0.10 m/s) while maintaining fixed heading, rather than turning to avoid collisions. High-speed video reveals that rapid lateral maneuvers are initiated through body roll, and that even during extreme roll maneuvers (with the stroke plane tilted 45° from the horizontal), bees maintain a fixed horizontal head posture, or gaze. These observations present two complementary hypotheses for the role of lateral maneuvering. 1) Body dynamics favor rapid maneuvering along the body axis with the lowest moment of inertia, thus roll-based maneuvering maximizes rapid collision avoidance. 2) Roll-based lateral maneuvering allows for continuous visual feedback (through counter rotation of the head) while navigating through challenging environments. By performing free-flight perturbation experiments, we explored the relative roles of visual feedback and body dynamics in roll-based lateral maneuvering. Our experiments suggest that the flight strategies employed by bumblebees in cluttered environments optimize both flight dynamics and sensory processing.
