By Susan Milius
After decades of work, two teams of scientists have cracked some long-standing puzzles regarding how honeybees buzz around without getting lost.
Ideas about honeybee odometers proposed by the great bee researcher and Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch turn out to be dead wrong, say Mandyan V. Srinivasan of the Australian National University in Canberra, a Canberra colleague, and coauthors at the University of Würzburg in Germany. In the Feb. 4 Science, they report their own simple key to reading honeybee odometer distances.