A laboratory-based setup was developed that allowed us to train bumblebees to a rewarding object (local cue) in the context of a panorama and simultaneously to record extracellularly the neural activity of units interpreted as mushroom body extrinsic neurons (MBENs). This setting simulates conditions flower visiting bees face when foraging excluding the compass related conditions. The bumblebees navigated between the colony an...

Communication processes are characterized by three components: the encoding of a message by the sender, the content of the message, and the process of decoding by the receiver. In honeybee waggle dance communication, the dancing bee encodes the vector as defined by the distance and direction of its outbound flight; the content of the message is a vector that defines a location by its endpoint in a rectangular (Cartesian) or ci...

Flying insects like the honeybee experience the world as a metric layout embedded in a compass, the time-compensated sun compass. The focus of the review lies on the properties of the landscape memory as accessible by data from radar tracking and analyses of waggle dance following. The memory formed during exploration and foraging is thought to be composed of multiple elements, the aerial pictures that associate the multitude...