So, what kind of brain does the honeybee have? You’ve probably heard the question “What is the last thing to go through a bees mind when it hits your windscreen?” the answer being its back legs. But how does this tiny creature learn to relate sun angles and distance to dance step routines, and how come all the bees all over the world understand only one language. Who could dare to say all this happened by accident?

If you wanted to duplicate the internal circuitry of the honeybee and match its navigational guidance system you would need an internal clock, a polarized light sensor, a sun angle-azimath computer, an instrument for measuring true vertical, you would need dead reckoning equipment, a wind speed direction indicator, trigonometric calculator and tables plus air and ground speed indicators, then you would need a sophisticated computer to co-ordinate it all.

Even more incredible is a Bees’ guidance strategy for avoiding crash landings. Landing safely is a difficult aspect of flight because the rate of approach must be reduced to near zero at touchdown. This is hard enough on horizontal surfaces, but even more challenging as inclination increases, i.e., when landing on surfaces of different orientation. Yet honeybees achieve this easily, hundreds of times per day.

To the amazement of engineers who had unsuccessfully tried lasers, radars, sonars and GPS technology in striving to design autonomous landing systems for flying robots, the bees’ guidance strategy is “surprisingly simple”. Experiments show that bees land safely by simply ensuring that the surface they are approaching expands at a constant rate within their field of vision. This is a form of optic flow monitoring.

Mandyam Srinivasan, professor of visual neuroscience at the University of Queensland, Australia, explained: “If you come in [to land] at a constant speed, the image [of the landing strip] appears to expand faster as you get closer. But if you keep the rate of expansion of the image constant, you automatically slow down and by the time you make contact you’re moving at almost zero speed.”

Mathematical modelling showed that the bees’ simple visual ‘autopilot’ technique worked on almost any type of surface—including walls and flowers—and did not need any information about airspeed or distance from destination. “Why didn’t we think of this before?” lamented Professor Srinivasan. He said that robotic aircraft could soon be equipped to mimic the bee’s landing strategy using a simple, lightweight video camera. The image-only landing technique could also be applied to stealth military planes (no radar or sonar for an enemy to detect) and spacecraft (landing on other planets without GPS to guide them). However, it’s most doubtful that the computer required for this programming would be as tiny as a bee’s brain!

It’s surely self-evident that no ‘guidance strategy’ came about by itself. And the One who designed that of the bee has also given us the ultimate ‘guidance strategy’ to avoid the ultimate ‘crash landing’ (check out Colossians 1:16–20, Romans 10:9, Revelation 20:15).
Bees don’t exist without flowers and many flowers don’t exist without bees. So how could all this happen just a bit at a time? It is much easier to believe the straightforward statement that we find in the first page of the bible “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”