Two odometers in honeybees?

Abstract

SUMMARYAlthough several studies have examined how honeybees gauge and report the distance and direction of a food source to their nestmates, relatively little is known about how this information is combined to obtain a representation of the position of the food source. In this study we manipulate the amount of celestial compass information available to the bee during flight, and analyse the encoding of spatial information in the waggle dance as well as in the navigation of the foraging bee. We find that the waggle dance encodes information about the total distance flown to the food source, even when celestial compass cues are available only for a part of the journey. This stands in contrast to how a bee gauges distance flown when it navigates back to a food source that it already knows. When bees were trained to find a feeder placed at a fixed distance in a tunnel in which celestial cues were partially occluded and then tested in a tunnel that was fully open to the sky, they searched for the feeder at a distance that corresponds closely to the distance that was flown under the open sky during the training. Thus, when navigating back to a food source, information about distance travelled is disregarded when there is no concurrent input from the celestial compass. We suggest that bees may possess two different odometers -a ʻcommunityʼ odometer that is used to provide information to nestmates via the dance, and a ʻpersonalʼ odometer that is used by an experienced individual to return to a previously visited source.

A stingless bee can use visual odometry to estimate both height and distance

“…Our results indicate that despite the lack of celestial cues and a relatively low light environment in the dense forest understory, M. panamica is able to reliably use optic flow to measure distance traveled. This contrasts with results from honey bees, which suggest that in the absence of sky cues foragers cease to collect information on distance traveled (Dacke and Srinivasan, 2008).…”

“…In both honey bees and desert ants (C. fortis), it appears that odometric information is not accumulated when there is no concurrent view of the sky to provide celestial cues (Dacke and Srinivasan, 2008;Sommer and Wehner, 2005;Ronacher et al, 2006). Unlike more open environments such as deserts or temperate forests, the dense canopy of the tropic forest obscures most views of the sky, and what sunlight does penetrate is filtered through dense foliage (Croat, 1978;Leigh, 1999).…”

A desert ant's memory of recent visual experience and the control of route guidance

“…However, the constraint that transitions in behaviour coincide with transitions in the panorama could be relaxed by incorporating a regulatory mechanism previously proposed to explain learnt routes in bare or homogeneous environments. Honeybees can learn to search for an inconspicuous feeder after travelling a fixed distance within a homogeneous channel [33][34][35]. It is then the distance travelled within the associated panorama that provides the cue to switch off [11] suggests that this middle section of the route is encoded, primarily with respect to the features on cylinder itself, as a single segment.…”

Odometry and insect navigation

“…A narrow tunnel of approximately 8cm in width provides a strongly increased optic flow for the bees, leading to massive overestimation of travel distance, by factors of more than eightfold. One striking result of such experiments is the suggestion that there are two odometers in honey bees, one used for communicating the distance of food sources to nest mates, and the other, a personal one, used by the individual to find its way about (Dacke and Srinivasan, 2008).…”