An RFID study of stingless bees found that seemingly minor environmental cues strongly affected how reliably returning foragers identified their own colonies.
Bees from densely arranged, visually similar hives drifted into neighbouring colonies much more often, while distinctive hive colours and opposing entrance orientations reduced nearest-neighbour errors. Position mattered even more: bees from edge colonies drifted far less than bees from inner colonies. The results show how collective organisation depends not only on individual navigation but on the informational structure of the shared environment.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.01.742195v1
