do they even smell things?
In: Biology
Bees have several ways to navigate to food. They do have an internal “compass” as /u/sifsand pointed out. It’s a little more complicated because as far as I can tell from the sources I’m reading, they don’t sense the Earth’s magnetic field to find north and south, they use local magnetic fields. They only notice the changes and differences of the magnetic fields close around them rather than using it to know a fixed north/south position.
They can also navigate using the Sun as a fixed position, although that also gets more complicated because the Sun is *not* a fixed position. Exactly how bees adjust for the position of the Sun is not entirely known.
To find food the first time, bees do indeed have a good sense of smell using their antenna. They can smell pollen and will go looking for the source of that smell. Bees also have pretty good eyesight and can look for the bright colors of flowers. Very importantly, bees can see ultraviolet light that is invisible to humans and many other animals. Flowers that may not look particularly colorful to us may reflect UV light in a way that stands out to bees, so the bees can easily see the flowers even from a distance.
The bright colors of flowers aren’t there to look pretty. The colors are advertisements for pollenators like bees. The flowers *want* bees to visit because the bees pick up the pollen and carry it to other flowers, fertilizing those flowers so the plant can reproduce. Bees evolved alongside the flowering plants and know that the bright colors are billboards for the flowers which contain sugary nectar for the bees as a reward for carrying the pollen. Bees also take a lot of the pollen for themselves to digest and turn into honey.
Once bees have found a good source of food, they will remember how to get there. They use all of their navigational tricks to build a mental map to get back to the hive (and if they reverse it, to get back to the food). Once back in the hive, bees tell other members of the hive how to get there. They do this with *dancing*. They have a special waggle dance that explains what direction to go relative to the Sun and how long to fly in that direction. Other bees memorize the map through the dance and can find that food easily.
Bees have a built in sensor to help them navigate. In afdition they have excellent memory retension.
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