Wonder bees

A new study suggests that bees rely on a built-in 'satellite navigation (sat nav) system' to find their way around.
    Honeybees make 'mental maps' of their home ranges allowing them to pinpoint destinations miles away from their hives.
While humans, sharks and even pigeons are known to use this technique, it was popularly thought that bees rely solely on the sun's position to find their way back to their hive.
To come up with their finding, scientists captured and anaesthetised honeybees and shifted some of their circadian (body) clocks by six hours to disorientate them.
They fitted them with tiny radar transponders to track their movements after releasing them in a different location.
The researchers reasoned that if the bees did rely on the sun as a compass, then the alteration to their body clocks would disrupt their ability to find their way home.
They found that when the bees with altered body clocks were let out in a field in Brandenburg, Germany, they returned with similar speed and accuracy as those that had not been put to sleep, according to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr Cheeseman of Auckland University in New Zealand said "The results suggest bees may navigate by a mental terrain map in addition to learned sun-compass directions."
The discovery is remarkable because the insects must somehow construct a type of map that includes information on directions, distances, diverse landmarks, feeding sources and terrain features to permit the complicated computation of an efficient journey home.