[Tyler]

Mental Maps and Honeybee Odometery
     

Keeping and consulting internal maps is a frequent method employed by
robot builders to navigate complex environments. A Nature
article describes the debate over whether Honeybees, which are much
smarter than robots, keep internal maps. When a honeybee finds food,
communicates the distance and direction to the hive through a complex
dance. 20 years ago, Fred
Dyer and James
Gould placed food in a very unlikely place (the middle of a lake on
a boat) to see what would happen. A specially trained bee that knew the
location of the food tried to tell the hive but the other bees didn't
seem to believe it. The conclusion was that bees knew it was unlikely
food could be found over water, suggesting they
were evaluating the location's plausibility based on their own cognitive
map of the area. A more recent attempt by Margaret Wray to duplicate the
experiment has failed to get the same results but may have been flawed.
Another researcher, Juergen
Tautz, suggests there may be a simpler explanation for the bees
refusal to fly over water, so the jury is still out. The Tautz paper is
interesting in itself: Honeybee
Odometry: Performance in varying Natural Terrain (PDF format).
   

http://robots.net/article/2574.html