Reynolds Andrew M, Smith Alan D, Menzel Randolf, Greggers Uwe, Reynolds Donald R, Riley Joseph R
Rothamsted Research, Harpenden, Hertfordshir, United Kingdom.
Ecology. 2007 Aug;88(8):1955-61. doi: 10.1890/06-1916.1.
Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are regularly faced with the task of navigating back to their hives from remote food sources. They have evolved several methods to do this, including compass-directed "vector" flights and the use of landmarks. If these hive-centered mechanisms are disrupted, bees revert to searching for the hive, but the nature and efficiency of their searching strategy have hitherto been unknown. We used harmonic radar to record the flight paths of honey bees that were searching for their hives. Our subsequent analysis of these paths revealed that they can be represented by a series of straight line segments that have a scale-free, Lévy distribution with an inverse-square-law tail. We show that these results, combined with the "no preferred direction" characteristic of the segments, demonstrate that the bees were flying an optimal search pattern. Lévy movements have already been identified in a number of other animals. Our results are the best reported example where the movements are mostly attributable to the adoption of an optimal, scale-free searching strategy.
蜜蜂（西方蜜蜂）经常面临从遥远的食物源返回蜂巢的导航任务。它们已经进化出了几种方法来完成这一任务，包括利用罗盘导向的“矢量”飞行和地标。如果这些以蜂巢为中心的机制受到干扰，蜜蜂就会转而寻找蜂巢，但它们搜索策略的性质和效率迄今尚不清楚。我们使用谐波雷达记录了寻找蜂巢的蜜蜂的飞行路径。我们随后对这些路径的分析表明，它们可以由一系列具有无标度、幂律分布且尾部符合平方反比定律的直线段来表示。我们表明，这些结果与线段的“无偏好方向”特征相结合，证明蜜蜂正在飞行一种最优搜索模式。幂律运动已经在许多其他动物中被发现。我们的结果是所报道的最佳示例，其中这些运动主要归因于采用了最优的、无标度搜索策略。
