The lives of the bees in a honey bee colony depend upon the ability of foragers to successfully fly as far as several kilometers to locate and collect nectar and pollen and then find their way back to the nest. They are considered a homerange species, defined as a navigating animal that can find its way over a relatively short distance, as compared to a migratory animal that travels quite far.
Because this short-range navigational ability is so important to bees, they are "overengineered," as James Gould describes it, with an armament of several alternative methods based on various sensory cues that they use to find food. Axel Brockman and Gene Robinson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have identified five different sensory systems that bees use to locate nectar sources and communicate their location to their nest mates, and they traced each sensory pathway to the location in the brain where it is processed.
In simple terms, bees can see and smell the flowers when they get close enough, and if the sun is out, they can use a timecompensated sun compass, for example, keeping the sun to the left in the morning in order to fly south. They also are able to use distinctive landmarks as part of their orientation, a type of spatial memory that enables them to retain information about the location and orientation of particular details in their environment.
Co-author Elizabeth Capaldi Evans and Fred Dyer studied the acquisition of visual spatial memory in honey bees and determined that bees rapidly learn the location of their hive on special orientation flights taken when they first depart from a hive in a new place. This large-scale spatial learning is similar to the learning that occurs when bees first explore new patches of food.
The investigatory flights around the food were described as "turn back and look" flight by Miriam Lehrer, and were explored in more detail by Cynthia Wei and colleagues, who found that bees actively choose to spend less time on learning flights as they gain experience traveling to and from a foraging site. This finding is particularly interesting, as it indicates that bees can assess their own knowledge and can act to increase the contents of their memories. Certainly, this selective learning behavior indicates a higher level of cognitive ability than might be expected in an insect.
Adrian Dyer and colleagues trained bees to recognize images of complex natural scenes and found that the bees were quite accurate in recognizing these landmarks and discriminating between a known scene and similar views that were introduced to confuse or distract them. Mandyam Srinivasan and colleagues in Canberra, Australia, trained bees to fly through short tunnels to collect a food reward and demonstrated with a series of experiments that their ability to monitor flight distances (their odometer) is visually driven, based on the amount of "image motion" that is experienced by their eyes as they travel along their route. When the sun is not clearly visible, honey bees can use the pattern of polarized light in the sky as a navigational guide.
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