An insect travelling over open ground is generally considered to maintain a reasonably constant direction by means of a light compass reaction, with the sun as the light source. This opinion appears to have been based first on Santschi's (1911) original observations of ants, and later to have been extended to insects in general after von Buddenbrock (1917) described the light compass reaction. It has remained fixed despite von Frisch's (1950) discovery of the role of plane polarized light in the orientation of flying bees, perhaps because some emphasis was still placed on the sun as a light source, so that the existing hypothesis always seemed to encompass new information (Wellington et ah, 1951). More recent observations raise serious doubts concerning the effectiveness of the light compass reaction in the field, however, and these seem worth careful consideration.
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W. G. Wellington (1955) studied this question.