Greetings,
        That bees have a "mental map" is certainly evident to anyone
who has attempted to move a hive a short distance; in fact there is
an old saying that it is easier to move a hive 10 miles than 100 feet.

        Suppose you have a hive in the backyard and you want it in
the front. If you just move it, you will soon find a large number of
foragers flying in circles about the position of the old hive. If you
put an empty hive that "looks like" the original one, they will start
streaming into it. If you put a hive of, say a different color or
size, the will go in, but less eagerly. *It appears* that they are
comparing the situation to their "image" of how it was, or should be.

        Now, if you really want to succeed in moving this hive form
the front yard to back, and not lose your field force, you must start
by moving it a couple of feet. The bees look for their hive where it
was and then look nearby, soon finding it. After a couple of days,
move it again. Now they are "expecting" it to not be exactly where it
was and they are more inclined to hunt a bit.

        Continue moving the hive- you can even move it a little
farther each time because they have "learned" that it isn't going to
be exactly where it was. The whole process can be performed in about
a month. Another way to do it is to move the hive in one trip during
the winter. When spring comes most of the older bees will have died
and the new bees will learn the new spot.

        Another good example of honey bee mental image is, if you
have an apiary that is fairly overgrown with grass or weeds, and you
mow it- the bees fly about in circles, obviously confused by the
*change in the appearance* of the apiary.

        Bees forage over a range of about 100 square kilometers
(Seeley). Evidently they form a "mental map" of this area and can
find their way back to the nest even if they are taken somewhere they
haven't been and released (Gould). None of this should be a surprise
to anyone who has worked with images on the computer or used a
digital camera. Surpisingly complex images can be compressed into an
incredibly small space when encoded into binary code. Such a binary
code seems to be the way that information is stored in the neural
network of various animals, including honeybees.

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Peter Borst
Apiary Technician
Dyce Honeybee Lab
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY  14853
[log in to unmask]
phone: 607 275 0266
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/plb6/
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