🧠 Bee Neuroscience: Learning & Navigation Lab

About this simulation

A honey bee's brain weighs about 1 milligram and holds under a million neurons, yet it learns new food odors in a single trial and navigates kilometres of open country. This scene shows both feats at once: on the left, a simplified mushroom-body circuit — the insect brain's associative-memory hub; on the right, a foraging flight guided by a sun compass and path integration.

How the learning circuit works

• Each odor activates a distinct subset of antennal-lobe glomeruli (the glowing input spheres).
• Glomeruli connect randomly and sparsely to thousands of Kenyon cells in the mushroom body, so each odor is recoded as a unique, sparse pattern of active Kenyon cells (highlighted in the cloud).
• Kenyon cells synapse onto output neurons (MBONs) that drive approach or avoidance. Dopamine released during reward or punishment reweights only the synapses of the currently active Kenyon cells — a biologically real, single-trial learning rule.
• Running trials without reward for the same odor extinguishes the learned preference, just as it does in real bees.

How the navigation flight works

• The bee flies a winding outbound route referenced to the sun's compass bearing (its azimuth), continuously integrating each leg into a running "home vector."
• When foraging ends, it doesn't retrace its path — it flies the straight home vector computed by path integration, exactly as real bees and ants do.
• Rotating the sun's azimuth reproduces classic mirror/redirection experiments: the whole outbound route reorients with the sun, because the bee's turns are stored as sun-relative angles, not compass angles.

Controls

• Odor pattern — choose which scent's Kenyon-cell code is shown and trained.
• Pair with sugar reward — toggles whether the training trial is rewarded (appetitive) or unrewarded (extinction).
• Learning rate — how strongly one trial shifts the approach/avoidance synaptic weights.
• Run training trial — fires the odor, shows the active Kenyon-cell code, and updates the output weights.
• Sun azimuth — rotates the sun and re-derives the outbound flight path relative to it.

Did you know?

Randolf Menzel's decades of work on honey bee learning showed that a single pairing of odor and sugar reward can produce a memory lasting days — a single-trial associative memory rivaling much larger brains, built from roughly 170,000 Kenyon cells per hemisphere.