An ‘instinct for learning’: the learning flights and walks of bees, wasps and ants from the 1850s to now

Abstract

The learning flights and walks of bees, wasps and ants are precisely coordinated movements that enable insects to memorise the visual surroundings of their nest or other significant places such as foraging sites. These movements occur on the first few occasions that an insect leaves its nest. They are of special interest because their discovery in the middle of the 19th century provided perhaps the first evidence that insects can learn and are not solely governed by instinct. Here, we recount the history of research on learning flights from their discovery to the present day. The first studies were conducted by skilled naturalists and then, over the following 50 years, by neuroethologists examining the insects’ learning behaviour in the context of experiments on insect navigation and its underlying neural mechanisms. The most important property of these movements is that insects repeatedly fixate their nest and look in other favoured directions, either in a preferred compass direction, such as North, or towards preferred objects close to the nest. Nest facing is accomplished through path integration. Memories of views along a favoured direction can later guide an insect's return to its nest. In some ant species, the favoured direction is adjusted to future foraging needs. These memories can then guide both the outward and homeward legs of a foraging trip. Current studies of central areas of the insect brain indicate what regions implement the behavioural manoeuvres underlying learning flights and the resulting visual memories.

Switching perspective: Comparing ground-level and bird’s-eye views for bees navigating clutter

“…Accordingly, the visual mechanisms that have been considered are primarily based on the information that can be seen from close to the ground (frog's-eye view) [50]. However, when flying insects exit their nest for the first time and are not yet familiar with their surroundings, they increase the distance to the nest during loops, arcs and spirals and vary their flight altitude during so-called learning flights [10,29,35,38,47]. They may therefore learn and use visual sceneries at different altitudes.…”

The effect of patch distance, matrix type and experience on habitat perception and flight speed of two species of Heliconius butterflies

“…Naïve individuals, on the other hand, are forced to rely on innate process for orientation and are likely more susceptible to orientation errors. Such an effect is known in migratory animals (McLaren et al, 2022;Syposz et al, 2021) and in homing social insects where experience results in improvement over time (Collett & de Ibarra, 2023), but it is unknown how experience affects perceptual range. We predict that if adult learning affected orientation, we would then expect that experienced butterflies would be better at detecting the forest habitat than naïve butterflies.…”

Switching perspective: Comparing ground-level and bird’s-eye views for bees navigating clutter

“…Accordingly, the visual mechanisms that have been considered are primarily based on the information that can be seen from close to the ground (frog’s-eye view) [50]. However, when flying insects exit their nest for the first time and are not yet familiar with their surroundings, they increase the distance to the nest during loops, arcs and spirals and vary their flight altitude during a so-called learning flights [10, 29, 35, 38, 47]. They may therefore learn and use visual sceneries at different altitudes.…”