Honeybees Use Optic Flow to Measure the Distance of a Food Source

摘要

Honeybees returning to the hive from a newly discovered food source use the dance language to inform potential recruits about the feeder's direction and distance. Researchers exploring the bees' orientation performance have agreed that bees determine the direction of the food source by using the sun com- pass. However, a long-lasting controversy still exists with respect to the possible cues bees use to measure the distance to the food source. Based on a large amount of experimental data, Karl von Frisch and several of his students proposed that the bees infer the distance to the food source by measuring the amount of energy spent on the foraging trip ("energy hypothesis").