Here’s How Honeybees Fly in Windy Conditions

Over a week in September 2021, they tested how bees flew in eight different turbulence scenarios and compared them to a no-wind baseline. To coax the bees to fly in the right direction, they assembled screens on either side of the hive. A fence, bordered with trees and bushes, served as a natural barrier on the opposite side of the hive. To film the bees flying, the team set up three GoPro cameras in the experiment area, each placed at a different angle.

With three different images of the same bee, the researchers used computer codes to track its path in three dimensions. The team then used this data to calculate the bees’ velocity and acceleration.

They found that the bees’ average velocity didn’t seem to be affected by the wind — not what you’d expect from a small insect battling strong gales.

“If you, for example, are walking in headwind, you're slower, you're fighting against the wind, right? And maybe your velocity is less because of that,” Hejazi says. Or the opposite could be true: If you’re riding a bicycle downwind, you’re probably going faster.

Credit: Bardia Hejazi

Hejazi and his colleagues manufactured turbulence using four fans behind a grid array with movable flaps.

“[But the bees are] maintaining that average velocity, regardless of the windy conditions that we're producing,” he says. “We thought, ‘That can't be. There has to be something going on.’”

So, Hejazi dug deeper into the data, examining exactly when the bees were speeding up and slowing down. He found that bees took a long time to accelerate, but they braked rapidly when making sharp turns, like a car that slows down around a curve. This pattern is called a flight-crash event, and it also occurs in fluid turbulence.

Further calculations showed that in conditions without wind, the bees tended to fly straight and turn sharply. But in wind, the bees didn't fly straight at all. Instead, they constantly made turns and performed evasive maneuvers. Hejazi says he could see these behaviors during the experiments, too.

“They had this really disturbed type of flight when they were trying to fight against the wind,” he explains, adding that similar movements have been observed in bacteria and fruit flies.

“It's interesting to see that it's kind of universal across different scales, different systems,” he says. “I was surprised.”

Understanding how insects like honeybees fly may help engineers design drones and other robots that can maintain their speed and control as they move. But for now, Hejazi wants to expand his research and study how bees fly in relation to each other.

“How do they know not to bump into each other?” he asks. “What mechanisms do they use to identify each other? ... Learning as much as we can about how they fly and how they behave with each other — that’s really helpful.”

Margaret Osborne is a freelance writer based in Utah.