Meeting Abstract
Bees flying in natural habitats often encounter unpredictable wind conditions and cluttered vegetation – features that may adversely affect flight performance. Despite many studies examining how bee flight is affected by wind or by obstacle arrangement, we know little about the strategies that bees adopt when traversing spatially variable environments with both obstacles and wind. We examined the flight performance and behavior of honey bees (Apis mellifera) flying through a chamber with an array of vertical obstacles that did not extend to the ceiling, allowing bees to fly through the obstacles and/or above the obstacle “canopy.” We varied the height of the array between trials (obstacles occupied 5% to 65% of the vertical space in the chamber) and tested bees flying upwind, downwind, and in still air. As obstacles grew taller in any wind condition, bees flew more slowly and took more time to traverse the array but did not change peak performance (maximum speed and acceleration). In each wind condition, bees adjusted the lateral component of their flight paths to stay farther from tall obstacles than from short obstacles. Finally, bees in wind did not adjust the vertical extent of their paths in response to array height, whereas bees in still air increased the total vertical space traversed – they extended the upper extent of flights (flew higher) but maintained the lower extent of flights as array height increased. Our results show that simple variation in obstacle features like height can interact with wind to alter bee flight performance and behavior. Thus, bees foraging in natural environments, and the pollination services they provide, may be affected more than previously thought by the interaction between wind and the configuration of surrounding vegetation.
