Honeybees can learn the relationship between the solar ephemeris and a newly-experienced landscape: a confirmation

Abstract

SUMMARYHoneybees learn the spatial relationship between the sun's pattern of movement and the landscape immediately surrounding their nest, which allows bees to locate the sun under overcast skies by reference to the landscape alone. Surprisingly, when bees have been transplanted from their natal landscape to a rotated twin landscape -such as from one treeline to a similar but differently oriented treeline -they fail to learn the relationship between the sun and the second landscape. This raises the question of whether bees can ever learn the relationship between the sun's pattern of movement and a landscape other than their natal one. Here we confirm, with new and necessary controls, that bees can indeed learn the relationship between the sun's pattern of movement and a second (that is, non-natal) landscape, if the second landscape is panoramically different from the bees' natal site. We transplanted bees from their natal site to a panoramically different second site and, 3days later, tested the bees' knowledge of the relationship between the sun and the second landscape. The test involved observing the bees' communicative dances under overcast skies at a third site that was a rotated twin of the second. These bees oriented their dances using a memory of the sun's course in relation to the second landscape, indicating that they had learned this relationship. Meanwhile, control bees transplanted directly from the natal site to the third site, skipping the second, danced differently, confirming the importance of the experimental bees' experience at the second site.

The Geomagnetic Field Is a Compass Cue in Cataglyphis Ant Navigation

“…As the present results show, the ants most likely accomplish the former task, but whether the geomagnetic field is also involved in the latter task cannot be decided yet. Rather, a suite of elegant experiments performed in honeybees support the hypothesis that the local landmark skyline provides the decisive geostable reference for calibrating the solar ephemeris [27]. In birds, cross-calibration has been suggested between the geomagnetic field and celestial cues [28].…”

The brain behind straight-line orientation in dung beetles

“…In general, hymenopterans display navigation behaviors that rely on long-term memories of their visual surroundings (Collett et al, 2003;Cheeseman et al, 2014;Menzel et al, 2005;Degen et al, 2016;Graham and Cheng, 2009;Fleischmann et al, 2018). Other ant species and wasps are well known to take such snapshot views, called panoramic snapshots, to aid their homeward navigation while foraging (Judd and Collett, 1998;Zeil et al, 2003;Buehlmann et al, 2016;Stürzl et al, 2016), and bees form a memory for the solar ephemeris (the sun's position at given times of the day) relative to local landmarks (Dyer and Gould, 1981;Towne and Moscrip, 2008;Kemfort and Towne, 2013). These panoramic snapshots and landmark memories are believed to be stored in the mushroom bodies (Collett and Collett, 2018), which provide enough 'storage capacity' for a large Fig.…”