A honeybee flies through a tunnel with checkerboard-pattern sides. The bee’s every movement is recorded by high-speed video cameras, as researchers in a $2-million greenhouse here on the roof of the Queensland Brain Institute study how the insects navigate through complex environments, avoid collisions, and manage soft landings.
“The neat thing about bees is they can be trained,” says the leader of the laboratory, Mandyam Srinivasan. “They will do almost anything you ask them to do for a drop of sugar water.”
One floor down, Mr. Srinivasan, a professor of visual neuroscience, puts the knowledge he has gleaned from bees’ brains to work. He and his colleagues use computer simulations, miniature aircraft, and cameras designed to mimic bees’ eyes to test their flight strategies. The goal is to create safer, more comfortable, and, for the military’s purposes, stealthier motorized flight.
In its quest to become a more innovative economy, or “Smart State,” the Australian state of Queensland wants to attract more scientists like Mr. Srinivasan. His findings are published in prominent journals like Nature and Science, giving a boost in global rankings to the University of Queensland, home of the brain institute. His research is supported by the U.S. military, basic-science agencies, and the aviation industry. He also had enough clout as a researcher to become a Smart State Premier’s Fellow, an award that takes care of his salary and serves as a magnet for more talent.
While Mr. Srinivasan’s use of bees as a way to understand the brain is unusual at the Queensland Brain Institute, his general approach is not. Others in the building study fruit flies, mice, worms, and humans, and then try to apply their research. “To address diseases of the nervous system,” says Perry Bartlett, director of the institute, “I felt we needed to go back to the basics and learn how the machine worked.” To do that, the brain institute draws on a variety of disciplines.
Mr. Srinivasan says he is an “engineer who turned into a biologist.” He grew up in India and did his undergraduate studies there before going on to get his doctorate at Yale University, working with a professor whose specialty was, he says, “bug eyes.” After stints at the University of Zurich and Australian National University, Mr. Srinivasan moved to Queensland five years ago.
He does much of his work in the rooftop All Weather Bee Flight Facility, which the institute built as part of a package to recruit him. Wooden landing pads stick outside of the edge of the roof, giving the bees a place where they can easily exit and enter. Inside are hives, equipment to study the bees in flight, and walls of netting to keep them from straying too far. The bees spend much of their time out in the crowns of trees and rarely bother students below. (Studies of aggressive bees take place off-campus.) The bees need no coaxing to make the flight facility their usual home, except when the flowers are out in spring. “Its very hard to get the bees inside for experiments then,” Mr. Srinivasan says.
Some of Mr. Srinivasan’s research builds on the well-known communication abilities of bees. He is an acute observer of their behavior. After watching the waggle of a bee’s abdomen, he points to the sun, spins on the floor 140 degrees, and then indicates that a nectar source is located about 400 yards away.
One of his goals is to explain visual guidance in all flying creatures. He has found that bees have a mental speedometer that is based on the images they see flying by. That discovery resulted in part from having the bees fly through the tunnel, which has two checkerboard sides that are each connected to belt drives. When scientists sped up the rate at which the patterned sides moved toward a flying bee, the bee would slow down. This indicated that the flying bee was basing its speed on the images that went by rather than on any independent measure.
When bees land, Mr. Srinivasan says, they do not adjust their landing speed based on estimates of how distant the landing surface is, but on the expansion of the image that they see. By keeping the expansion of that image constant, he says, the bees get “a nice, beautiful touchdown.” That finding could potentially help motorized flight.
Mr. Srinivasan has started working with birds to see if their flight control is similar to that of bees. So far he has found that the birds he is studying, budgerigars, a brightly colored species considered a subspecies of the parrot, do control their speed by monitoring the images that they fly past.
Mr. Srinivasan and his colleagues also take fixed-wing model aircraft and rotorcraft that can move at slow speeds without stalling, outfit them with cameras similar to bees’ eyes, and test the theories of how bees navigate their world. Test flights are done an hour’s drive away from the institute, at a family farm with an airstrip.
The scientists even fly the airplanes on simulated hive-to-nectar-source runs to check their assumptions about how bees find their way through the most important features of their world.
And the researchers have used their biologically inspired methods to get the planes to autonomously execute extreme maneuvers, like half-loops, barrel rolls, and other tricks descended from World War I aerial combat. Such maneuvers serve as extreme tests of the bee versions of autopilot.
Mr. Srinivasan’s research is at a stage where it can be tested only in model airplanes, not in commercial jets. But some day, frequent fliers may be able to thank honeybees for a better ride.

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