> besides location, the appearance at entrance level is the critical factor
I learned the hard way that this "entrance level" loyalty was far LESS critical than expected.
It was "general assembly week" at the UN, so several hives on the roof of the Interconnectional Barclay in Manhattan had to move up to the Bronx for a week, as a team of snipers doing overwatch on both the Barclay and the Waldorf across the street did not want to take any chance of being bothered by bees, and I agreed that a bee flying by at the wrong moment is not going to produce the sort of good marksmanship required in a civilian-heavy / target-poor environment.
But, as always not ALL the bees can be included in any move, so I left a Shoebox with a queen pheromone lure and a sugar water-soaked sponge to accommodate any stragglers behind when we moved the hives by night.
But, the next day the open, screenless windows of a penthouse-level suite were getting quite a few bees flying in, attracted to the cut flowers in vases, which was very disconcerting to the staff and bodyguards of a foreign head of state who shall remain nameless. The general manager of the hotel knew exactly what was going on, and ordered maintenance to get some snap-in screens installed pronto, and to make sure the suite was bee free.
The returning stragglers did not enter the catch box, but instead went in the windows, perhaps blown in by the laminar airflow that tends to run up and/or down the surface of any skyscraper. My personal theory is that, because it was a breezy day, the bees used the laminar flow just as a kayaker would ride along with the current of a river to get up to the roof more easily, and got unexpectedly sucked into the penthouse, as the windows had not been opened in some time.
Anyway, no harm done, and it was an amusing story told with relish by the otherwise extremely earnest and serious, incredibly polite, closely barbered, neatly dressed, painfully young, and extremely heavily-armed members of the team that was enhancing security for the visiting dignitaries.
After that incident, the top three floors of windows in the hotel were all fitted with window screens, unusual in almost 100% bug-free Manhattan.
In fact, bees don't seem to have a good grasp of the concept of height at all, using only (x,y) rather than (x,y,z) coordinates for navigation, or more succinctly, "The dance language has no words for altitude" (von Frisch, "The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees", 1967). Bees certainly remember to fly up to a feeder suspended from a balloon, even one 70 meters above the ground, higher than any tree bloom would be, but this knowledge may be "landmark" related, and ad-hoc. ( See Esch and Burns 1996, full text here: http://jeb.biologists.org/content/jexbio/199/1/155.full.pdf )
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