Bugs&More@AT: #Bee

Sometimes you see a flower and immediately think it would be great for bees. But when you look at the flower, you don't see a single insect. And then you see a green bush and you might think that it's not interesting for insects at all. But when you get closer, the bush emits an impressive sound, proving that even in autumn, hundreds of bees and flies are present.

The well-known scene from the movie Jurassic Park, which shows that "objects in the mirror are closer than they appear," could be rephrased as "simple things are more complicated than they appear."  

This also applies to the motion-control of insects such as bees, which communicate their environment by locomotion, similar to what we call path planning in industrial robots. Moving a single axis seems trivial. But moving a single axis in such a way that it results in coordinated motion of a dozen axes could lead to an unsolvable mathematical challenge.

Extrapolate this to hundreds of bees to be replaced by nano-bots when there are no more bees. Easier to keep the species and learn what they do and why they do it - I guess.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. E. Engels

Photos: E. Engels