A bee and how it sees, that is the question.

Sunshine, the shimmer of warm air, and the low drone of bees buzzing from flower to flower all convey the lazy feeling of summer. For bees, however, foraging is serious business and their path is far from haphazard.

Bees use visual landmarks to guide their return to a familiar place. Unlike humans, who can usually recognize a traffic intersection from any corner, bees remember places retinotopically - if they learn a shape with one part of their eye, they can only recognize it again with that same part.

To simplify storage and retrieval of these retinotopic memories, says Thomas S. Collett of the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, bees take their bearings while facing in one direction - magnetic south. Collett trained groups of honeybees to collect sugar from a bowl placed north, south, east, or west of a cylindrical landmark. Most bees looked south when approaching and leaving the food, Collett reports in the March 10 NATURE.

Bees trained to find a sugar bowl located south of the cylinder, however, proved a revealing exception, says Collett. The landmark shows the bees which direction to head in as they search for food. But south-flying honeybees lose sight of the cylinder as they fly. So they look northwest instead - Collett's not sure why they pick northwest - to keep their reference point in view. This shift suggests that bees store memories of landmarks from a preferred orientation, Collett adds, and adopt the same viewing position when using their memory to search for a goal.

Cloudy skies and depolarized light didn't affect the bees' orientation. However, bees placed in an artificial magnetic field looked toward the imposed magnetic south, regardless of Earth directions. "Bees have magnetite in their abdomens," says Collett, which works "as a sort of compass." When the same bees were tested without the artificial field, they simply turned until the scene took up its accustomed retinal position.

"This has been one of the big puzzles about how bees, insects, and even vertebrates learn spatial information," says Fred C. Dyer, an entomologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Collett's work confirms that bees are not limited to chance recognition of objects seen exactly as they were before.

More important, adds Dyer, it shows that bees cannot mentally manipulate and identify such spatial relationships. Rather, bees function somewhere in between, "Instead of rotating their minds' eyes, they simply rotate their actual