Bees create a buzz with landing style
It’s all about vectors — those tricky combinations of speed, angle and range that haunt all snooker players. When it comes to handling a drone or trying to soft-land a probe on Mars it is, as one expert states, ‘computationally demanding’. But bees solved the maths millions of years ago, despite having extremely small brains. Your average bee flies at about 30km an hour and then lands on a flower petal which may be horizontal, vertical or at any oblique angle in between, and which may also be moving in the breeze.
Engineers are reluctant to admit that they have been outsmarted by an insect, but this fact has eventually dawned on researchers, in Sweden and Australia, and they’ve started to try and work out how bees do it. The result is startlingly simple.
