Navigating in Clutter: How bumblebees optimize flight behaviour through experience

Bumblebees are excellent navigators that travel long distances while retracing paths to known locations. They forage not only in open terrains but also in cluttered environments where obstacles force them to deviate from direct paths. This study investigates the underexplored aspect of how bees become experienced foragers and optimize flight behaviour in cluttered terrains. We recorded flight trajectories of novice bees inexperienced in navigating cluttered environments and monitored their behavioural performance as they gained experience on subsequent foraging trips through numerous obstacles. By controlling for experience levels, we analysed how flight characteristics evolve with increasing expertise. Successful navigation in cluttered terrains requires avoiding collisions with obstacles. This is only possible if these can be detected by visual features such as the retinal displacement of contrast edges. Obstacles which are harder to detect and to avoid by the bees can affect their flight performance. By introducing transparent objects into our dense environment, we challenged collision avoidance and learning mechanisms, analysing their impact on flight optimization under different environmental conditions. Our findings reveal that experienced bees fly similar paths through clutter and quickly adapt their flight regardless of their training environment. However, the specific paths followed are influenced by environmental conditions. Transparent objects primarily affect naive bees’ flight patterns while having minimal impact on flight optimization, suggesting that the efficient flights of experienced bees result not solely from reflexive collision avoidance but from learning and previous experience in cluttered environments.