Honey bees pollinate a large proportion of our crops and wild plants and live in highly organized communities in which each animal takes on a specific task. The foraging bees fly out every day, look for nectar and pollen, note productive food sources and pass on their knowledge in the hive. They demonstrate amazing orientation skills and reliably find their way even over long distances. Researchers have now examined in more detail how exactly they navigate.
Honey bees cover amazing distances on their foraging flights. There can be several hundred meters or even kilometers between the hive and the food source. To ensure that they can navigate these paths reliably, they use various forms of orientation. They obtain information from their surroundings, remember distances traveled and keep an eye on their direction of flight. Despite decades of research, how exactly this navigation works is still not fully understood, especially because it is difficult to precisely track the flight paths of individual bees in the open landscape.
Each bee flies its own route
A research team led by Rachael Stentiford from the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg has now examined this in more detail. In order to specifically observe the bees on their respective routes, the researchers used “Fast Lock-On (FLO) Tracking”. A small, highly reflective marker is attached to the insect. An image sensor aligns itself with it and illuminates it with infrared light. Simple image analysis can reliably find and keep an eye on the bee within a few milliseconds. “Our tracking system makes it possible for the first time to record high-resolution 3D trajectories of honey bees in natural landscapes,” explains senior author Andrew Straw from the University of Freiburg.
The analyzes revealed: “Our recordings show that each bee has its own preferred route and follows it very precisely. You could almost say that each bee has its own personality.” The 255 flight routes analyzed led through a landscape on the Kaiserstuhl, with hedges, a corn field and a tree that blocked the direct path between the beehive and the food source. “We were able to determine a very high precision of the flight paths within the chosen paths. Individual bees repeated their individual flight paths exactly on several flights. They often fly past only a few centimeters away from their previous routes,” explains Straw.
The bees flew most accurately where there was something easily recognizable in the landscape, for example near a prominent tree. Things looked different over the corn field, because because everything looks pretty much the same there, the flight paths varied significantly more. Clear landmarks help the bees to find their way precisely. Where the environment is monotonous, it becomes more difficult for them to navigate.
Good orientation despite imprecise waggling
The study also provides new information on the interpretation of the waggle dance with which honey bees indicate food sources to their conspecifics. “It was previously known that the directional information in the waggle dance was not entirely precise,” explains Straw. For food sources about 100 meters away, the direction of the waggle dance can deviate by around 30 degrees.
However, the new results show that individual bees can navigate much more accurately when flying to a known target. Even where their flight paths vary the most, on average they only deviate a few degrees from their usual path. The comparatively inaccurate information in the waggle dance is obviously not because bees are poorly oriented – in fact, they move through their environment much more precisely than their dances suggest.
Source: University of Freiburg; Specialist article: Current Biology, doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2026.01.045