posted for information/discussion purposes only from
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Issue May 2000:

http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/proc_bio/proc_bio.html

Two spatial memories for honeybee navigation
R. Menzel, R. Brandt, A. Gumbert, B. Komischke, J. Kunze
Volume 267 Issue 1447 page 961


Insect navigation is thought to be based on an egocentric reference system
which relates vector information derived from path integration to views of
landmarks experienced en route and at the goal. Here we show that honeybees
also possess an allocentric form of spatial memory which allows localization
of multiple places relative to the intended goal, the hive. The egocentric
route memory, which is called the specialized route memory (SRM) here,
initially dominates navigation when an animal is first trained to a feeding
site and then released at an unexpected site and this is why it is the only
reference system detected so far in experiments with bees. However, the SRM
can be replaced by an allocentric spatial memory called the general
landscape memory (GLM). The GLM is directly accessible to the honeybee (and
to the experimenter) if no SRM exists, for example, if bees were not trained
along a route before testing. Under these conditions bees return to the hive
from all directions around the hive at a speed comparable to that of an
equally long flight along a trained route. The flexible use of the GLM
indicates that bees may store relational information on places, connections
between landmarks and the hive and/or views of landmarks from different
directions and, thus, the GLM may have a graph structure, at least with
respect to one goal, i.e. the hive.

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