It is essential for central place foragers, such as bumblebees, to

return reliably to their nest. Bumblebees, leaving their inconspicuous

nest hole for the first time need to gather and learn sufficient

information about their surroundings to allow them to return to their

nest at the end of their trip, instead of just flying away to forage.

Therefore, we assume an intrinsic learning programme that manifests

itself in the flight structure immediately after leaving the nest for the

first time. In this study, we recorded and analysed the first outbound

flight of individually marked naïve bumblebees in an indoor

environment. We found characteristic loop-like features in the flight

pattern that appear to be necessary for the bees to acquire

environmental information and might be relevant for finding the nest

hole after a foraging trip. Despite common features in their spatio-

temporal organisation, first departure flights from the nest are

characterised by a high level of variability in their loop-like flight

structure across animals. Changes in turn direction of body

orientation, for example, are distributed evenly across the entire

area used for the flights without anysystematic relationship to the nest

location. By considering the common flight motifs and this variability,

we came to the hypothesis that a kind of dynamic snapshot is taken

during the early phase of departure flights centred at the nest location.

The quality of this snapshot is hypothesised to be ‘tested’ during the

later phases of the departure flights concerning its usefulness for

local homing.