Long-lived, long-distance forager honeybees
I'm not 100% sure I've understood your question, but I'll take any opportunity to go on about bees, so.
Honeybees are eusocial insects capable of abstract thought, mental navigation maps and social exchange of complex foraging information. One aspect that many of these papers don't necessarily highlight is these experiments are all carried out of foraging bees.
The caste system in honeybees is peculiar compared to, for example, ants, in that all bees except queens and drones go through the various castes as they age - starting out close to the "core" of the colony with jobs such as tending to the eggs and pupae, and then moving closer to the surface, handling food and waste, then guarding the boundaries of the hive, until, at the end of their life, they start to leave the colony to forage. Foragers actually grow new neural pathways in preparation for this step. In particular, they build up their mushroom bodies[1] which are the learning and memory structures of the insect brain and generally considered the "higher order processing" computational centre in invertebrates.
But forager bees are doomed. They typically only live 2-3 weeks after leaving the hive. During this time, they are able to feed themselves on nectar while on a forage (they consume a stupendous amount of energy!) but they are still shackled to the hive for other nutrients, since the ability to digest protein is restricted to a specific, hive-bound caste. Interestingly, if the hive experiences a collapse, some foragers will move back in and "revert" to the indoor types[2] that have been depleted; if they do, then their life expectation can increase to even several months.
As they reach the end of their brief outdoor life, their brains rebuilding themselves for the beauty and complexity of the natural world, these foragers become more and more adapted to the outside world. Their accumulated experience makes it easier for them to navigate and their foraging strategies more effective. I wonder what would happen if they didn't have to die so soon?
Maybe the landscape that your bees forage on requires very long trips, so the foragers can't reliably come back to the hive between forages. Maybe this leads them to retain their own protein-digesting enzymes. Maybe, with time and nutrients, their brain can keep growing, the pruning of experience offset by fresh new connections. Maybe the additional range they gain leads them to develop intermediate "cache stations" for pollen. Maybe these become local hubs where foragers who have ventured far afield waggle dance to the new explorers about their adventures. Maybe they compete to gain "followers" - more foragers on the same route means a better chance at an unbroken supply line back to the hive. Because as much as they know that they can never go back, the hive is still home.
[1] yeah, not a good name, I mean they are very vaguely mushroom-shaped if you squint, I guess
[2] I can't seem to find the ref to this, I wonder if it's a beekeeper myth? But my pubmed-fu is rubbish lately.