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Honeybees express foodward flight vectors after a detour

Anna Hadjitofi,Marie Messerich,Tim Landgraf,Barbara Webb

Published 2025 in Journal of Experimental Biology

ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT The honeybee waggle dance communicates a flight vector to a food source, but it is challenging to isolate how precisely dancers and recruits can navigate using this vector information independently of environmental cues. We introduce an enforced-detour paradigm, using tunnels, to quantify the initial flight vectors expressed by experienced foragers and new recruits en route to the food. Upon exiting the detour, bees exhibit immediate corrective turns consistent with using path integration to fly towards the food's virtual location. While the populations' flight bearings after the turn are correctly centred on the food, the bearings of individuals are considerably scattered around it. We further show that recruits' bearings can be predicted by observing their mechanical sensory experiences during dance following. Our findings suggest that the communicated or recalled vector can be combined with path integration to take corrective shortcuts, but also that the vector provides an approximate location rather than pinpoint accuracy.

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