Dogs’ excretory habits and bees’ foraging behaviours are two other behaviours connected to magnetoreception. First, a group of experts from Germany and the Czech Republic studied 70 dogs of 37 different breeds and discovered that they prefer to urinate with their bodies oriented along the north-south axis (Hart et al., 2013). Other mammals including resting cattle while grazing, roe deer, red deer, and hunting red foxes have been observed to exhibit magnetic alignment, which is defined as “spontaneous alignment of the body with respect to the magnetic field lines, when other determinants (e.g. wind direction, sun position, curiosity) of the body position are negligible” (Hart et al., 2013, p.1) (Hart et al., 2013). To continue, the iron granules in bees’ abdomens are thought to act as their magnetoreceptors (Liang et al., 2016). They use a variety of visual cues to navigate in addition to the sky compass’s direction information and geomagnetic orientation cues. As has been established to be the magnetoreception in the majority of other insects, including fruit flies, blowflies, cockroaches, and butterflies, cryptochromes are also found in the brains of bees. The development of the honey bee’s magnetite-based magnetoreception, however, may be due to research showing that bees also respond to changes in the magnetic azimuth in completely dark surroundings. In contrast, cryptochromes cannot function without blue light excitation (Liang et al., 2016, p.4). It is believed that these superparamagnetic particles transmit the signal across the cytoskeleton by expanding or contracting in a direction-dependent way (Hsu et al., 2007). Other research has connected honey bee magnetosensitivity to foraging, homing orientation, and comb construction (Lambinet et al., 2017). Future research on this skill, which appears crucial to their survival, could involve bees as they are thought to be a model organism for researching magnetoreception (Johnston, 2017).
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