Large Scale Homing in Honeybees

Large Scale Homing in Honeybees

Honeybee foragers frequently fly several kilometres to and from vital resources, and communicate those locations to their nest mates by a symbolic dance language. Research has shown that they achieve this feat by memorizing landmarks and the skyline panorama, using the sun and polarized skylight as compasses and by integrating their outbound flight paths. In order to investigate the capacity of...

Homing in Scale Space

Navigation in Large-Scale Environments Using an Augmented Model of Visual Homing

Several models have been proposed for visual homing in insects. These work well in small-scale environments but performance usually degrades significantly when the scale of the environment is increased. We address this problem by extending one such algorithm, the average landmark vector (ALV) model, by using a novel approach to waypoint selection during the construction of multi-leg routes for ...

The avian hippocampus, homing in pigeons and the memory representation of large-scale space.

The extraordinary navigational ability of homing pigeons provides a unique spatial cognitive system to investigate how the brain is able to represent past experiences as memory. In this paper, we first summarize a large body of lesion data in an attempt to characterize the role of the avian hippocampal formation (HF) in homing. What emerges from this analysis is the critical importance of HF fo...

Assessing homing failure in honeybees exposed to pesticides: Guez's (2013) criticism illustrates pitfalls and challenges

I have been involved in a publication showing that sublethal exposures to thiamethoxam, a neonicotinoid pesticide, increase the risk of homing failure in foraging honeybees (Henry et al., 2012a). Along with other recent toxicological studies on free-ranging bees (Gill et al., 2012; Schneider et al., 2012; Whitehorn et al., 2012), those results have motivated the European Food Safety Agency (EFS...