Follow the flower: Approach-flight behaviour of bumblebees landing on a moving target

While landing on flowers, pollinating insects often have to deal with flower movement caused by wind. Here, we determined the landing performance of bumblebees on a moving artificial flower, and how they use their visual-motor system to control their landings. To do this, we built an experimental setup containing a physical model of a flower, moving sideways using sinusoidal kinematics at various oscillation frequencies (up to 0.65 Hz, at constant amplitude of 5 cm). We filmed the landings of Bombus terrestris bumblebees on this moving flower model and extracted the flight kinematics and trajectories using deep neural network-based videography tracking. The bumblebees were capable of compensating for the detrimental effects of flower movement on landing performance for flower frequencies up to 0.53 Hz. Only at our maximum frequency of 0.65 Hz, the percentage of successful landings decreased, but landing accuracy and duration were not affected. To successfully land on the moving flower, ..., , , # Data from: Follow the flower: Approach-flight behaviour of bumblebees landing on a moving target

Flight kinematics data of bumblebees landing on an artificial flower moving vertically at five different movement frequencies (0, 0.03 Hz, 0.24 Hz, 0.53 Hz, and 0.65 Hz). The dataset contains 728 successful landing manoeuvres of bumblebees from 2 hives. It includes the temporal dynamics of the position, velocity, and acceleration of the bumblebees and the flower during the approach flight of the bumblebees. NaN- not a number.

The bumblebee_data folder (containing 30 csv files) contains the x and y position of the bees, the vx and vy velocity of the bees, and the ax and ay acceleration of the bees in separate csv files. Position, velocity, and acceleration of the middle, left, right, head, and tail of the bumblebees are included. Each csv file inside this folder contains 728 columns and 300 rows, each column representing a separate landing trajectory over time. The trajectories are aligne...,