This is Scientific Americans' 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkins.

They say it's darkest before the dawn, and that's just the way that sweat bees like

it. These tropical insects, which live on an island in the middle of the Panama Canal,

visit night-looming flowers under cover of darkness. And a new study shows that the shapes

made by gaps in the rainforest canopy help them find their way home. The work appears

in the journal, Current Biology. Even though most bees are active in bright

daylight, there are a few species that have become nocturnal due to competition and due

to predators. Eric Warren, a professor of zoology at the University of London in Sweden.

This is particularly true of the warmer parts of the world, such as esteemy rainforests of

Panama. Warren and his colleagues have been studying these night-flayers, called Megaloptogenelus,

for more than 20 years. We have discovered that like all bees, Megaloptor is able to

learn visual landmarks around the nest and presumably also along the foraging root.

They use these landmarks to find their way through the vast forest and to recognize their

nests. It's no easy feat, especially considering the size of these nocturnal navigators.

Only how they manage to do this with such tiny eyes and with such a small brain is still

to a large extent the mystery. But it seemed that the first step would be to simply look

up. There is one visual cue that is quite obvious

in this otherwise profoundly dim environment and these are the bright patches of night sky

seen through gaps in the forest canopy directly above.

But do the bees raise their eyes while flying forward in the dark to find out the researchers

got to messing with the Megaloptor. We placed the Megaloptor nest, which is a hollowed

outstick at the stand in the forest. Sandra Scheib, a University of London doctoral

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