Dave & Yoon wrote:
>bees on the leaving leg of their flight, might fly through the gaps in the
fence or through the mesh, but bees on the return journey went mainly over
the top edge of the wire

>I see my bees fly THROUGH my chicken wire into the coop to wallow in the
dust of cracked corn that I feed my Rhodes Island Reds with. Some do fly
four feet up to avoid the wire, but most fly right *through* the thin
[almost invisible]wire mesh.

Hi Yoon:

Do they fly THROUGH the wire in both directions, or do they fly over the
wire on the return trip?

Another paragraph from Wilson’s ‘The Insect Societies’:

“In further experiments Hertz discovered that bees have a spontaneous
preference for the most dissected figures while they are searching for
food. At first this response  was considered to be a fundamental attraction
to complex patterns, but later experiments revealed that, once the bees
have fed and are attempting to return home, they prefer the opposite
stimulus, namely, the simplest possible figures.”

I guess, though, as Adrian pointed out all this needs to be taken with a
grain of salt.

Regards,
Dick Allen