RANDOLF MENZEL is Professor Emeritus of Neurobiology at the Free University of Berlin in Germany. Since he first started investigating insects almost 50 years ago, Professor Menzel has studied how honeybees learn colours, how their memory is organized, and how memory is implemented in the neural network of the bee brain. More recently he has been looking at how bees navigate to different locations and how they communicate about locations. Here he discusses his recent paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about a proof for the existence of mental maps in honeybees.