Many species of hymenopterans use visual landmarks to guide navigation both nearby and on the way to distant foraging locations. It is known that honey bees and several species of ants will use conspicuous landmarks experienced along their path to guide travel when the goal is not in view. Previous work has suggested that insects use these en-route landmarks in at least three ways; 1.) as intermediate “checkpoints” for correcting errors accumulated by their path integration system. 2.) as cues for segmenting their path into a series of shorter, more precise trajectories (usually called local vectors). 3.) as cues to facilitate the learning of additional visual information along the path.

Our experiments provide evidence for yet another role that en route landmarks could play in honey bee navigation. We show that when unsuccessful at finding the goal, honey bees frequently return to the most recently experienced landmark and then launch another attempt to find the goal. The data suggest that this “re-setting” behavior provides an online means for bees to ensure they are on the correct path. Having increased certainty about their current location seems to allow bees to persist longer in the goal location before returning to the nest.