 Sometimes, I come across interesting topics that I want to talk about on the channel, but they are quite long enough to be their own videos. Normally, these ideas just never get made, but I decided to try out a new series of quick videos that will occasionally post in addition to the normal weekly ones. This is the first, and I hope you enjoy it. Just like you go down the block to grab some Chinese takeout, bees have to venture out to find food. If the bee doesn't already know where to find food, they'll fly all over the place, and in a regular path, until they find some tasty pollen. In all, they can travel up to 6 miles away from the hive. But after they fill up on pollen, they don't retrace their steps on that regular path, but instead, fly in a straight line back to the hive. But how do they do that? How do they know their way back to the hive? You might think bees just have mental maps of their surroundings, and just know where to fly to get back. Kind of like how you don't need a GPS to find your way back from Walmart, you just know the route from knowing your town. But bees' brains are much simpler and lack structures like the hippocampus and atornial cortex that play a vital role in forming these sort of cognitive maps that us humans can make. And when they get back to the hive, they'll do a little dance, shaking their thorax. Through this dance, they can transmit the location of their new snack. After this dance, the other bees will fly straight to the source and then straight back. This is a really interesting behavior, but it raises the question, how on earth does a bee know where it's going, and how can it explain this direction to others? And keep in mind just how small a bee is. A bee being able to navigate over a six mile radius is like a human being able to navigate the entire state of Texas, all on their own. Research into bees' mysterious abilities show that they actually use the sun to navigate. Since the sun is so far from earth, over a short period of time, it's basically a static object in the sky. It turns out that bees use the relative angle to the sun to chart their path. And because bees can see polarized light, they can figure out where the sun is, regardless of whether it's obscured by clouds. Then, when the bee returns to the hive, they do their little dance, shaking their thorax. The bees first dance in a reference position, and then dance in a new direction. This angle between the reference position and the new direction is the same angle between the food source and the sun relative to the hive. This shows that bees are at least somewhat aware of their directional capabilities, enough to explain it to the other bees. I hope you liked this quick bit and learning more about our little friends. If you like learning about species and nature, check out this full length video on Pablo Escobar's invasive hippos that are still causing problems in Colombia to this day. Have a great day and remember, there's always more to learn.