This is scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Jason Goldman.

Honey bees, they have a difficult task. First, they have to find food.

Then they have to return to the hive

to tell their compatriots where to find it.

The bees have to fly back and forth

between the hive and their food over and over again.

And they need to deal with whatever obstacles lie along their flight paths.

Honey bees face a lot of challenge in choosing efficient foraging routes through dense environments.

And we basically want to study how they choose effective fruits, the safest and these energy expanding routes.

Mary L. Ong, a researcher at the University of Queensland in Australia.

To track the insect navigation, she and her team set up tiny obstacle courses for more than a hundred honeybees.

Along the way, the bees were forced to fly through one or the other of two openings of different sizes.

And as a group, the bees usually flew through the wider opening, which makes sense, less chances of slamming their tiny bee bodies into a wall.

But things got more interesting when Aung looked at the decisions made by individual bees one by one.

We found that 55% had no biases, and then the rest of the 45% was a split between left-handed bees and right-handed bees. In other words, some honey bees have a sidedness.

They obviously don't have hands, but let's say they're either right-handed or left-handed.

So for example, a right-handed bee would prefer to navigate the cramped right-side opening in the obstacle, then go through the left-side hole, even though it was larger and safer.

Sometimes the handed bees would even land and walk through the smaller opening just so they could use their preferred side.

These biases apparently help the members of large swarms navigate through a complex environment without crashing into each other.

If all bees were right-handed, it would take a long time for the entire group to pass through

a small opening, such as a hive entrance. But by having a range of side biases, the entire swarm can move more quickly when it encounters an obstacle.

The research is in the journal Ploss 1.

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