Like the explorers of old, bumblebees are remarkable navigators. Flying up to 5 km away from their hives, bumblebees travel far and wide in search of tasty treats to bring home. But these insects can't always fly straight home afterwards. The tiny travelers need to navigate through a maze of trees and other obstacles that block their path while always trying to take the most straight-forward route back to the hive. While this may seem a difficult task for a human, these bees seem to find the straightest route home without getting lost or turned around by the obstructions in their way. This observation led Manon Jeschke, Maximilian Stahlsmeier, Martin Egelhaaf and Olivier Bertrand of Bielefeld University, Germany, to ask how the buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) gains the experience it needs to find its way home through the clutter without getting lost or injured.

First though, the team had to let the bees get used to their new home attached to the flight chamber. After a week, the bees had settled in, so the researchers made it more difficult for the bees to return home after a foraging trip. They filled their return path with a maze of 110 translucent red plastic rectangles which the bumblebees had to navigate around on their way home. Each bee made 15 trips while Jeschke and colleagues videoed the path it took while traversing the plastic forest. Over the course of these trips, the bees shortened their journey from 54 s to a mere 5 s suggesting that they had learned the fastest route that would get them home unharmed. Not only did the bees speed up their trip but they also spent less time adjusting their speed, learning how to steer around the plastic obstructions without needing to slow down. But what would happen if the obstacles were harder for these fast flyers to see?

To see whether the bees could avoid colliding with hard-to-see objects, Jeschke and the team replaced 32 of the red rectangles with clear ones, right through the middle of the maze. At first, it was harder for the bees to make their way through the labyrinth of plastic, but the bees perfected their trips back home just as they had when navigating through the obstacles they could see more easily. However, the bees did make some changes to their flightpath. While the bees still learned to quickly navigate home in as straight a line as possible, they shied away from the center of the maze, preferring to take a path to the right of the chamber. The reason the bumblebees took this route remains a mystery, but it wasn't just the path they took that was different. ‘Surprisingly, they didn't avoid the transparent objects at all – they actually chose to fly close to them’, explains Jeschke. The team believes that bees can detect transparent objects quite well, probably noticing the edges of the plastic.

Interestingly, each bee was remarkably consistent in the path they chose during each attempt, changing from a meandering trip while attempting to avoid the obstacles to a quick zip home to drop off food for the hive. Not only are they avoiding collisions but these insects are forming memories of the best path home and learning strategies for navigating as well. These feats certainly come in handy when these tiny explorers need to find their way home through potentially labyrinthine paths after their foray to find food.