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By   Ker Than , LiveScience Staff Writer 16 November 2005 Many insects go back and forth between their nests and a food source multiple times. But if the route to the food is very similar to the route away from it, then the foragers might get confused and not know which way to go. Different insects have different ways of dealing with this problem. Bees   use the Sun   as their compass. But ants use visual landmarks and let their stomachs guide their way, a new study finds. Wood   ants   were trained to walk in a straight line alongside a black wall to reach a sugar reward at the other end. In this way, the ants learned that the wall would be on their left side when walking towards the sugar but on their right side when walking away from it back home. The distance between home and the sugar reward was about 3 feet. Later, the trained ants were set down   midway   along the wall and watched to see which way they would go. Some of the ants had already b...

By  Brandon Keim  -  February 3, 2009   If humans took their cues from ants, they might spend less time in traffic. When opposing streams of leafcutter ants share a narrow path, they instinctively alternate flows in the most efficient way possible. Studying how ants manage this could provide the basis for a system of driverless cars running on ant traffic algorithms. "They never get stuck in traffic," said  Audrey Dussutour , a University of Sydney entomologist. "We should use their rules. I’ve been working with ants for eight years, and have never seen a traffic jam — and I’ve tried." People have long been fascinated with the ability of ants to organize colonial activities in patterns as sophisticated as any urban engineer’s megalopolis blueprint. In recent years, scientists have turned ant traffic flows into algorithms applicable to  data transmission  and  vehicular traffic . Dussutour, whose earlier work showed that leafcutter ants organi...