Fine stripe patterns disrupt honey bee landings via spatial aliasing

Visual patterns are widely deployed as non-chemical insect deterrents, yet the visual mechanism remains unresolved. We tested whether spatial aliasing, arising from a mismatch between stripe geometry and compound-eye sampling, disrupts landing control. Using trained honey bees (Apis mellifera) and three-dimensional trajectory tracking, we quantified search and landing/entry performance across stripe scale and orientation. Stripe scale produced a non-monotonic behavioural response: disruption was greatest at intermediate stripe widths (~ 0.95-0.475 cm), where search times peaked and performance deteriorated. On a floor-mounted landing target, failures peaked at intermediate widths (up to 80% at 0.475 cm). On a wall-mounted target, horizontal stripe patterns yielded 70-90% off-target entries at these intermediate widths, whereas vertical stripe patterns at the same widths produced only 10-20% off-target entries. In contrast, when stripe width entered an ultra-fine range (≤ 0.23 cm; down to 0.175-0.075 cm), error rates decreased (e.g., wall off-target entries fell to 20%, and floor failures dropped to ~20%), consistent with patterns becoming poorly resolved and thus less disruptive. In the near-field, as viewing distance decreases and the angular scale of the pattern increases, landing performance becomes increasingly constrained by optic-flow quality: orientations that degrade coherent edge-motion cues during descent disrupt approach stability and touchdown/entry localization, increasing unstable approaches and off-target landings or entries. Together, these findings provide experimental evidence that spatial aliasing can impair both target localization and terminal landing manoeuvres, and they establish quantitative design rules for pattern-based, chemical-free deterrents.