How honey bees use landmarks to guide their return to a food source

Abstract

Bees trained to forage at a place specified by landmarks do not construct a cartesian map of the arrangement of landmarks and food source. Instead they store something like a two-dimensional snapshot of their surroundings taken from the food source. To return there, bees move so as to reduce discrepancies between the snapshot and their current retinal image. A computational model embodying these principles mimics the bees' behaviour.