For general interest:
I just read two articles in 'New Scientist' ** that I thought would bee
of interest, one related to Bees, the other to insects in general.
 
1) The first is about How insects actually manage to fly (according to
standard aerodynamics it should be impossible).
"Impossible Insects / On a wing and a Vortex",
http://www.newscientist.com/ns/971011/features.html
 
2) The second is directly related to Bees, and its about how they
estimate distances from the hive.
Turns out this article's only in the printed version of the magazine. In
summary the report explained how bees seem to measure distance by the
speed with which the ground went by during flight (rather than energy
expended as was first thought). The experiment involved getting honey
bees to fly down tubes, which had vertical black & white stripes painted
on the inside, to a sugar source. Removing the sugar source, and altering
the vertical strip pattern made little difference to the bees ability to
locate the orginal sugar source location. But altering the 'slope' of the
whole tube did,as the bees flew closer to the ground (& thus the ground
went by faster) as they flew 'up-hill', and tended to undershoot and stop
before reaching the sugar solution. Conversely with the tube down-hill
the bees overshot. With horizontal tube stripes (& thus virtually no
visual speed clues) the bees failed to find the orginal sugar source
location completely, flying straight into the end of the tube.
 
**(science and technology weekly magazine, online version at
http://www.newscientist.com).
 
Graham