Why the interest in honeybees? Many of us have marvelled at the ability of honeybees to find an attractive flower patch, miles away from their hive, and to return to it repeatedly with unerring accuracy. How do they do this with a brain smaller than a sesame seed? We don't know all the answers yet, but bees seem to be able to estimate the distance to a food source, gauge the direction in which to fly to reach it, and convey this information to their nestmates, so that they can forage from it, too, and thus collectively build up the colony's food reserves. How do bees estimate distance flown? It appears that they use one or both of the following cues. The first comes from measuring the amount of energy consumed when they fly to the destination by the reduction in the volume of their nectar-laden stomachs; the greater the energy consumed, the further the distance. And the second comes from measuring how much the image of the world appears to move in the eye as they fly to the destination; the greater the extent of image motion, the further the distance.