The role of orientation flights on homing performance in honeybees

Honeybees have long served as a model organism for investigating insect navigation. Bees, like many other nesting animals, primarily use learned visual features of the environment to guide their movement between the nest and foraging sites. Although much is known about the spatial information encoded in memory by experienced bees, the development of large-scale spatial memory in naive bees is not clearly understood. Past studies suggest that learning occurs during orientation flights taken before the start of foraging. We investigated what honeybees learn during their initial experience in a new landscape by examining the homing of bees displaced after a single orientation flight lasting only 5–10 min. Homing ability was assessed using vanishing bearings and homing speed. At release sites with a view of the landmarks immediately surrounding the hive, ‘first-flight’ bees, tested after their very first orientation flight, had faster homing rates than ‘reorienting foragers’, which had previous experience in a different site prior to their orientation flight in the test landscape. First-flight bees also had faster homing rates from these sites than did ‘resident’ bees with full experience of the terrain. At distant sites, resident bees returned to the hive more rapidly than reorienting or first-flight bees; however, in some cases, the reorienting bees were as successful as the resident bees. Vanishing bearings indicated that all three types of bees were oriented homewards when in the vicinity of landmarks near the hive. When bees were released out of sight of these landmarks, hence forcing them to rely on a route memory, the ‘first-flight’ bees were confused, the ‘reorienting’ bees chose the homeward direction except at the most distant site and the ‘resident’ bees were consistently oriented homewards.