I agree that more study of the re-orientation issue would be very helpful in a practical way and also purely as an advancement in understanding bee behavior.  

Study of both the aspect of physical barriers as a prompt forcing re-orientation, and whether time is any factor.  Three days is often said to be the relevant period, though when someone suggests penning in their bees outdoors for three days in warm weather, it always makes me cringe.

One of the consequences of the Walking Bee Disaster which I described above was that I immediately halted a planned series of hopscotching moves for all the other hives under my care, while I tried to figure out how to proceed without another horror-show.  This left me with hives scattered in the middle of my farm access road en route to new yard. I dithered for months, and finally in December my husband insisted we move the hives, which we did.  (That was the first of my whole-stack lifts due to the cold temps by then. An unexpected advancement of my hive-moving technique.)

But I still adhered to the three-day, penned-in rule.  Since it was December in upstate NY, and I had specifically chosen the moving day to coincide with the start of a predicted cold period, I was OK with that.  Lots of physical prompts were also placed in front of the hives' entrances, primarily surplus Christmas tree trimmings.

That happened to be a year of an early arrival of the Polar Express, and though I opened the entrances after three days, (leaving the branches in place) there wasn't any flying weather for another six weeks.  On the first warm day the bees streamed out -- through the still-in-place branches in front of the entrances -- to poop and stretch their wings. And then hundreds of them flew back to their old locations (the interim sites in the middle of the farm road where they had been in the fall while I dithered) and died in the deep snow before I realized what was happening.

So much for the three-day confinement period rule.

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