Honey Bees Are Expert Navitgators With Stunning Precision: Study Finds
Washington D.C. : Researchers tracked honeybees in the wild using a drone-based system and found that each bee follows its own highly consistent flight path. Some repeated their routes so precisely that they flew mere centimeters from where they had flown before.
Landmarks like trees helped keep them on track, while monotonous areas like cornfields led to more diversity. Honeybees are much more precise navigation experts than scientists once realized.
Researchers at the University of Freiburg have discovered that individual honeybees follow their own highly consistent flight paths and can repeat them with remarkable accuracy, relying on landmarks in the landscape to stay on course.
The study was led by neurobiologist and behavioral biologist Prof, who used a drone to monitor honeybees traveling between their hives and a food source located approximately 120 meters away in an agricultural environment. Dr. Conducted by Andrew Straw.
To track the insects in flight, the researchers used a technique called ‘Fast LockOn (FLO) Tracking’ developed by Straw’s research group. The method involves attaching a small reflective marker to each bee. A computer mounted on the drone analyzes the reflected light and can identify and track a bee in flight within milliseconds.
Observations have revealed that each honeybee follows its own preferred route and maintains that path with remarkable accuracy on both outbound and return journeys. Bees also appear to use features of the surrounding landscape to guide their journeys.
“Our tracking system makes it possible for the first time to record high-resolution 3D flight paths of honeybees in natural landscapes,” explains Straw. “Our records show that each bee has its own preferred route and flies that route very precisely. We can say that almost every bee has its own personality.”
How Do Honey Bees Use Landmarks to Navigate? Researchers analyzed 255 flight paths collected near Kaiserstuhl, Germany. The study area included fences, a cornfield, and a tree that blocked a direct path between the hive and the food source.
“We found a high degree of precision in the flight paths. Individual bees repeated their individual flight paths almost identically over several flights. They often fly only a few centimeters from their previous paths,” emphasizes Straw.
The most consistent flight behavior occurred near prominent landscape features, primarily trees. The greatest variation occurred when bees flew over the cornfield, where the landscape offered less obvious visual cues.
“Our results show that visual landmarks help bees navigate and increase the precision of their flight paths,” explains Straw. On the other hand, bees’ instability increases in visually monotonous environments.
Honey Bee Navigation and Waggle Dance
The findings also shed new light on the famous waggle dance that honeybees use to communicate the location of food sources to other members of the colony.
“It was previously known that directional information in waggle dancing was not completely accurate,” explains Straw. For food sources approximately 100 meters away, the directional information in the waggle dance may be off by approximately 30 degrees.
New research suggests that this lack of precision in dance is not due to poor navigation skills. Instead, bees appear to be much more accurate when traveling to places they already know.
“Our research has shown that individual bees navigate much more accurately to familiar locations. Even where their flight paths vary the most, they deviate only a few degrees from their individual routes. Our results lead us to conclude that the inaccuracy of the waggle dance is not due to the bees’ limited navigational abilities. Rather, individual animals are much more spatially oriented than their dance communications would suggest,” says Straw.
