Bees, they’re just like us.

Scientists in Australia found that individual bees have a preference of flying to the left or the right when faced with an obstacle in their path.

“We believe these individual biases help to improve the flight efficiency of a swarm of bees through densely cluttered environments,” Mandyam Srinivasan, one of the study’s authors, told the University of Queensland. The findings were recently published in PLOS One.

Researchers tracked 102 foraging bees to better understand their flight decisions and patterns. They dabbed each one with different color paints to distinguish them from one another.

They released the bees into a 47-inch long tunnel with a feeder placed at the end. In the middle of the tunnel was an obstacle that had two different adjustable openings.

First, researchers made one of openings twice as large as the other, and the bees chose the larger opening 80 percent of the time.

Next, researchers adjusted the openings to exactly the same size and, over 10 flights through the tunnel, 55 percent of the bees showed zero preference between the openings. But the remaining 45 percent were split – half of them repeatedly preferred the left and the other half the right.

Then the openings were adjusted to uneven settings and the biased bees’ flights were timed. If their favored side was the smaller opening, it took them longer to choose whether to try and get through the larger, easier opening or their favorite, smaller one. When their preferred side was the larger opening, it took them significantly less time to decide.

“Flying insects constantly face the challenge of choosing efficient, safe and collision-free routes while navigating through dense foliage,” Srinivasan said. “This finding could potentially be used as strategy for steering a fleet of drone aircraft.”