WHY can't bees fly over mirrors?In 1963, the Austrian entomologist Herbert Heran and the German behavioral scientist Martin Lindauer noticed something strange about the way honeybees fly through the air.
When a group of bees was trained to fly over a lake, they could only fly safely to the other shore if there were waves and ripples on the surface of the water.At the same time, when the lake was mirror-smooth, the insects suddenly lost their orientation - and even fell into the water. The results of that study confirmed the idea that
bees use visual cues to navigate during flight.In other words,
when the surface below the bees is mirrored, the insects assume that the ground below them is much farther away than it really is, and they lower their altitude to the limit.
