The use of landmarks and panoramic context in the performance of local vectors by navigating honeybees

SUMMARY Bees seem to use landmarks to segment familiar routes. They can associate, with a landmark, a memory that encodes the direction and distance of the path segment between that landmark and the next. The expression of the memory results in the performance of a local vector matching the distance and direction of the path segment. The memories of path segments appear to be ‘chained’ together, so that the performance of one local vector is sometimes sufficient to elicit the subsequent local vector, even in the absence of the associated landmark. We have investigated the effect of visual panoramic context on the expression of local vectors. Bees were trained to fly along a narrow channel to collect sucrose from a feeder positioned partway along it. Panoramic context was provided by various types of patterning on the walls. The channel was partitioned into different segments using landmarks of two kinds: a boundary landmark that marked a change in the pattern on one or both side-walls of the channel, and an isolated landmark, consisting of a baffle through which the bee passed, for which the wall pattern was the same before as after. In tests, we removed the feeder and analysed the search distribution of the bees for various arrangements of landmarks. Altering the spatial relationship between landmarks has different consequences for the two types of landmark. If the final boundary landmark is shifted, the centre of the search distribution shifts by approximately the same amount. Changes in the position of an isolated landmark have a weaker effect. In the absence of the final context, the search is disrupted. We suggest that for local vectors to be expressed the surrounding panoramic context needs to be appropriate. A comparison of search patterns from two different training configurations of landmarks supports the hypothesis that local vector memories merely encode route segments and that global positional coordinates are not linked to landmark memories.