Topic: honeybee

Central place foraging insects like the honeybee (Apis mellifera) are the masters of visual navigation of the insect world: They are able to reliably return to their nest under a wide range of visual conditions after only a few learning flights, (a feat so far unrivalled by any artificial system). Furthermore, they perform complex navigational tasks, such as ‘computing’ novel shortcuts between previously known but unrelated food sources, supporting claims about the existence of a ‘cognitive map’ in honeybees. This raises the question which internal representations of the world (and the animal’