Honeybees can recognise images of complex natural scenes for use as potential landmarks

SUMMARY The ability to navigate long distances to find rewarding flowers and return home is a key factor in the survival of honeybees (Apis mellifera). To reliably perform this task, bees combine both odometric and landmark cues,which potentially creates a dilemma since environments rich in odometric cues might be poor in salient landmark cues, and vice versa. In the present study, honeybees were provided with differential conditioning to images of complex natural scenes, in order to determine if they could reliably learn to discriminate between very similar scenes, and to recognise a learnt scene from a novel distractor scene. Choices made by individual bees were modelled with signal detec…