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Hive geometry shapes the recruitment rate of honeybee colonies

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Abstract

Honey bees make decisions regarding foraging and nest-site selection in groups ranging from hundreds to thousands of individuals. To effectively make these decisions, bees need to communicate within a spatially distributed group. However, the spatiotemporal dynamics of honey bee communication have been mostly overlooked in models of collective decisions, focusing primarily on mean field models of opinion dynamics. We analyze how the spatial properties of the nest or hive, and the movement of individuals with different belief states (uncommitted or committed) therein affect the rate of information transmission using spatially-extended models of collective decision-making within a hive. Honeybees waggle-dance to recruit conspecifics with an intensity that is a threshold nonlinear function of the waggler concentration. Our models range from treating the hive as a chain of discrete patches to a continuous line (long narrow hive). The combination of population-thresholded recruitment and compartmentalized populations generates tradeoffs between rapid information propagation with strong population dispersal and recruitment failures resulting from excessive population diffusion and also creates an effective colony-level signal-detection mechanism whereby recruitment to low quality objectives is blocked.

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Code for producing figures is available at https://github.com/sbidari/hivegeom

Notes

  1. Further down, this can be seen in Fig. 4f, g, which demonstrates that recruitment in peripheral patches begins sooner for a significantly lower than critical value of \(D_v\).

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Acknowledgements

SB and ZPK were supported by an NIH (R01MH115557) and NSF (DMS-1853630) grants. SB was also supported by a Dissertation Fellowship from the American Association of University Women.

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  1. Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

    Subekshya Bidari & Zachary P Kilpatrick

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  1. Subekshya Bidari
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  2. Zachary P Kilpatrick
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Correspondence to Zachary P Kilpatrick.

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Bidari, S., Kilpatrick, Z.P. Hive geometry shapes the recruitment rate of honeybee colonies. J. Math. Biol. 83, 20 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00285-021-01644-9

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