Bumblebees change flight paths to avoid predators

BBC : Although a physicist might be tempted to treat bumblebees as randomly moving objects hitting randomly distributed targets, they actually fly in the proverbial beeline and travel systematically from flower to flower unless predators are nearby. To study how the presence of predators might alter the bees’ behavior, Rainer Klages from Queen Mary, University of London, and colleagues placed artificial spiders—trapping mechanisms that grabbed and held the bumblebees for two seconds—in a small box along with two cameras, the bees, and artificial flowers where they could search for food. The cameras tracked the bees’ flight trajectories in three dimensions; the bees modified their foraging behavior by changing velocity and turning to avoid the spiders. The study indicates that interactions between foragers and predators should be accounted for in mathematical foraging studies, which can be based on models that are too abstract to be accurate.