The automatic pilot of honeybees

Using scanning harmonic radar, we make visible for the first time the complete trajectories of ‘goal–vector’ flights in honeybees. We demonstrate that bees captured at an established feeding station, and released elsewhere, nevertheless embark on the previously learned vector flight that would have taken them directly home from the station, had they not been artificially displaced. Almost all of the bees maintained accurate compensation for lateral wind drift, and many completed the full length of the vector flight before starting to search for their hive. Our results showed that bees tend to disregard landscape cues during these vector flights, at least initially, and rely on the ‘optic flow’ of the ground beneath them, and their sun compass, to judge both direction and distance.