If you’re a bee, a breeze-ruffled garden can be a minefield. For a small creature with delicate wings, airborne seeds, shifting leaves and lurching flowers are basically projectiles, trap doors and Godzilla-tipped skyscrapers.
It’s a situation honeybees deal with daily as they gather nectar and pollen.
Although researchers have looked into how bees navigate on blustery days, or through tight spaces, “no one has really pieced together how they move through moving obstacles in wind,” said Nicholas Burnett, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis.
In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, Burnett and colleagues addressed this gap — and found that when the going is tough, honeybees appear to high-tail it and hope for the best.
For the study, the researchers built a bee obstacle course. When confronted with moving rods in still air, the honeybees flew more slowly than when they encountered stationary obstacles.
But when the wind kicked up, they would actually speed up by about 50% when the rods were moving compared with when they were still.