TY  - JOUR
AB  - 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.
DA  - 2018
DO  - 10.1242/jeb.168674
KW  - Bumblebees
KW  - Learning flight
KW  - Intrinsic programme
KW  - Behavioural diversity
KW  - Local homing
LA  - eng
IS  - 2
PY  - 2018
SN  - 0022-0949
T2  - The Journal of Experimental Biology
TI  - Taking a goal-centred dynamic snapshot as a possibility for local homing in initially naïve bumblebees
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0070-pub-29174894
Y2  - 2024-11-21T17:20:16
ER  -