Data for: Visual guidance of honeybees approaching a vertical landing surface

Landing is a critical phase for flying animals, whereby many rely on visual cues to perform controlled touchdown. Foraging honeybees rely on regular landings on flowers to collect food, crucial for colony survival and reproduction. Here, we explore how honeybees utilize optical-expansion cues to regulate approach flight speed when landing on vertical surfaces. Three sensory-motor control models have been proposed for landings of natural flyers. Landing honeybees maintain a constant optical-expansion-rate set-point, resulting in a gradual decrease in approach velocity and gentile touchdown. Bumblebees exhibit a similar strategy, but they regularly switch to a new constant optic-expansion-rate set-point. Meanwhile, landing birds fly at a constant time-to-contact to achieve faster landings. Here, we re-examined the landing strategy of honeybee by fitting the three models to individual approach flights of honeybees landing on platforms with varying optic-expansion cues. Surprisingly, the la..., ,