An Optical Compass Inspired by Bee Vision<\/p>\n
Bees use polarized sunlight scattered by the atmosphere in order to navigate; they always know where the sun is, even if it\u2019s cloudy or behind a mountain. Then they waggle dance to inform their hive-mates about food source locations.<\/p>\n
So if a bee wants to fly straight towards the sun, it waggles straight up the hive. If the food is 30\u00b0 away from that polarization line, it waggles 30\u00b0 away from vertical. If the food is directly away from the sun, it waggles downward.<\/p>\n
And the distance they should fly is encoded on how long the waggle lasts. It depends on the species of bee, but a waggle of about 1 second means about a kilometer away. So a 45\u00b0 waggle for about 0.6 seconds means fly at 45\u00b0 angles from the sun polarization line for about 600 meters.<\/p>\n
The bee repeats this waggle dance over and over. And the more excited the dance, the better the food source. And if other bees verify it and perform the same dance, the signal gets amplified until the whole hive knows where to go.<\/p>\n
As shown in this video<\/a>, it\u2019s possible to construct an optical compass using polarized filters in order to wayfind like the bees. Pretty cool! (via damn interesting<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An Optical Compass Inspired by Bee Vision Bees use polarized sunlight scattered by the atmosphere in order to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":416813,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[199,79],"class_list":{"0":"post-416812","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-physics","9":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/416813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}