It starts out lost and bumps into everything. Each time it finds nectar, the brain cells that were firing get a little stronger, so good moves feel better next time. Watch it improve every try until it beats the level on its own. Ten levels, from an open meadow to wind, slippery dew, wormholes and wasps.
How much it wants to fly each way
At first every direction feels the same, so it tries things at random and bumps into hedges.
Nectar makes the cells that just fired grow stronger, so that move feels better next time. In real bees a chemical called octopamine carries this reward signal.
A place next to a good place starts to feel good too. Keep "Show what it learned" on and watch the gold spread from the flower back to the hive.
As it gets confident it explores less and flies the best route. Nobody ever tells it where the flower is.
Real honeybees have learned to fly through mazes in experiments, using the same kind of reward learning.
In experiments, bumblebees caught briefly by robot "spiders" learned to avoid the flowers where they lurked.
Bumblebees visiting several flowers learn the shortest loop between them, a puzzle that keeps computers busy. That is the grand tour.
This bee grows 4,000 to 15,000 Kenyon cells, depending on the level. A real honeybee has about 340,000, inside a brain of about a million neurons.