Animals and living organisms are continuously adapting to changes in their environment. How do animals, especially those that are critical to their ecosystem, respond to rapidly changing conditions in their environment? Here, we report on the three-dimensional trajectories and orientations of flying honeybees under calm and windy conditions in front of the hive entrance. We find that the average speeds, accelerations and angular velocities of honeybees increase with increasing wind speeds. We observed that pair separation between honeybees is highly controlled and independent of wind speeds. Our results on the coordination used by honeybees may have potential applications for swarm intelligent manned and unmanned aerial vehicles.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.