Science in the Glorious Quran: The Super Navigation
“فَاسْلُكِي سُبُلَ رَبِّكِ ذُلُلًا” (النحل: 69).
“Go along the pathways of your Lord, made easy.” (Qur’an, 16:69)
The worker honeybees may travel up to 10 km away from their hive and visit about 2,000 flowers for pollen and nectar each day, and yet they do not get lost. The above verse states that God has made it easy for bees to navigate around and find their way back to their hives. How that is accomplished has been unclear, until recently. Different researchers have found some clues, which are summarized in the following:
• A honeybee has a solar compass, which allows her to remember where things are in relation to the sun. The bee’s ability to see polarized light allows her to determine where the sun is, even if it is obscured by clouds.
• A honeybee has an internal clock which helps her determine how much the sun has moved during her journey so that she can tell other bees exactly where the food is in relation to the current position of the sun. She even learns about how the sun’s path across the sky changes during different seasons of the year and at different latitudes.
• A honeybee has cognitive mental maps: even if the position of the sun was confused, bees can use their mental maps of the landmarks of locations.
• A honeybee can smell flowers from kilometers away and can recognize the color of the flowers.
• A honeybee can sense distance using optic flow: nearby things produce more optic flow than distant objects. Therefore, while sitting in a moving vehicle they seem to move faster away. From the rate that an image appears to a moving bee, it can predict the position of the observed site.
• A honeybee can sense the electrical fields of flowers. While bees have a positive charge, flowers tend to have a negative charge. Therefore, when a bee arrives at the flower, pollen jumps from the flower to the bee and the charge of the flower is changed. This change in an electrical field can tell the bee whether a flower has been recently visited, and is hence short of nectar.
This is just what we have so far learned about how God has made the traveling paths of bees “easy to find”, as stated in the verse of the Glorious Qur’an above.
A honeybee has a solar compass.
The honeybee has cognitive mental maps.
A honeybee can smell flowers from kilometers away.
A honeybee can sense distance using optic flow.
Minute tags attached to bees help to study their navigation.
Negatively charged pollen jumped and covered the positively charged bee.