Why Animals Don't Get Lost

[jcgoldie]

1. So I've had a cat return home from 10 miles away...

...when we moved we kept her locked in the house for over a week but when she was let out she went back and we found her a week later on the old porch while getting the rest of our stuff. A couple years ago I sold a dairy goat to a lady with terrible fences about 5 miles up the road. The doe was partially crippled with one bad leg, a birth defect. She immediately escaped and was on the lamb for a month and a half before eluding humans and coyotes to arrive back home. She's one of my best milkers now.

Here's the really puzzling one. When you move a beehive to a new location miles away the bees come out and have no problem navigating back to their box in the new place. Beekeepers move the boxes seasonally to pollinate orchards all the time in this way. But if you move the hive just a few feet like across the yard, often the bees will be completely disoriented and form a ball on the ground in the old location where their hive was with the box sitting just a couple dozen feet away. You can usually remedy this by piling some branches at the entrance that they come out of as soon as you move it. The theory is that this new obstacle causes them to take stock of their surroundings before charging off to work. Otherwise they keep returning where it used to be.