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Animal behaviour

Survey flights in honeybees

Nature volume 403, pages 488–489 (2000)Cite this article

Foraging honeybees may range as far as 10 km from their hive to reach a foraging site and must then find their way home. Before a bee begins its foraging career in earnest, it performs orientation flights that seem to be designed to help it learn landmarks that can guide subsequent returns to the hive. Detailed analysis of these special-purpose flights is helping to clarify the strategies that bees use for learning and navigation. Segments of orientation flights in which the insect is near to the hive can be recorded on videotape — this phase of the flight has been closely studied in ground-nesting wasps when they emerge from their nest holes1. Later phases, when the bee is far from the hive, are much harder to monitor. Capaldi and her colleagues describe on page 537 of this issue2 the first examples of a bee's path during the later phases of the flight. They have used harmonic radar3 to follow the bee from when it leaves the immediate vicinity of the hive to its return.

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  1. School of Biological Sciences, Biology Building, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QG, UK

    Thomas Collett

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  1. Thomas Collett
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Correspondence to Thomas Collett.

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Collett, T. Survey flights in honeybees. Nature 403, 488–489 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35000679

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/35000679

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