Honeybees like to keep an eye on their surroundings as they fly around. While this generally helps them to navigate, it also means they get really confused by mirrors.
In 1963, a pair of European scientists trained bees to fly across a lake. They noticed that if the lake’s surface was flat and smooth, the bees couldn’t make it across without crashing into the water. Almost sixty years later, some French researchers have repeated the test, this time with fewer drowned insects.
The researchers trained bees to fly from one end of a tunnel to the other. Normally, the bees stayed at roughly the same distance from the floor throughout their entire flight.
Once they were trained, the floor was removed to reveal a mirror along the entire length of the tunnel, making it seem twice as tall as usual. Since the bees thought they were too high up, they tried to fix this by slowly, steadily flying straight into the glass.
Lachlan Writes Science 