Frau Dr. Charlotte Doussot

Social insects such as bumblebees are exquisite navigators. Bees daily commute between their hive and a foraging source. More impressively, bees can return to their inconspicuous nest entrance, hardly visible even from a close distance. How bumblebees manage such a feat?

They use a combination of diverse cues, be it visual, olfactive … and different navigational strategies available in their toolkit.

The visual information available to a bee when leaving its nest for the first time is complex and fluctuating. At that moment, bees engage in complex flight manoeuvres, which are thought to be the results of an active behaviour enabling the learning of the nest visual surrounding. Bees could remember views collected around their nest entrance that are encapsulating different proprieties of the visual surrounding such as brightness, contrast or even distance to the surrounding objects. But, the way bees collect these views will have an impact on how they can use them when returning. The stored information is compared with the current information, which will guide the insect to its home location. Different strategies and parameters might be involved in this homing trip, such as time, the modality of comparison, the reliability of the information ...

My research focuses on how bees learn the visual or other information at their nest location and how they later retrieve and use it. To answer this question, I am interested in combining behavioural and modelling investigations, targeting both the learning flight procedure and the return trip (or local homing) to their nest entrance.