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Bees use the position of the Sun in the sky to navigate and find their way back to their hives. This is aremarkable in itself--since the Sun moves across the sky during the day, the bees navigate with respect to a moving reference point rather than a fixed reference point. Even if the bees are kept in the dark for part of the day, they still navigate with reference to the Sun; they compensate for the motion of the Sun during the time they were in the dark. They must have some sort of internal clock that enables them to keep track of the Sun's motion.
What do they do when the Sun's position is obscured by clouds? Experiments have shown that the bees can still navigate as long as there is a patch of blue sky. To humans, a patch of blue sky doesn't reveal the position of the Sun behind the clouds, but to bees it does. How is this possible? |