BEES ACQUIRE ROUTE-BASED MEMORIES BUT NOT COGNITIVE MAPS IN A FAMILIAR LANDSCAPE

Recent experiments suggested that forager honey bees, Apis mellifera, can store 'cognitive maps' of a landscape, i.e. internal representations that allow them to take novel short cuts while flying between sites that they had visited separately from the nest. Replication of these experiments revealed that the behaviour predicted by the map hypothesis is better explained by the hypothesis that bees use landmarks associated with specific routes travelled previously. As flexible as the bees' orientation is, there remains no evidence that the underlying spatial memory encodes the kind of geometrical information learned by humans and other vertebrates. © 1991 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.