Hive geometry shapes the recruitment rate of honeybee colonies

TL;DR

This study models how hive geometry influences honeybee communication and decision-making, revealing tradeoffs between rapid information spread and recruitment failure, and highlighting the role of spatial structure in collective behavior.

Contribution

It introduces spatially-extended models of honeybee decision-making that incorporate hive geometry and individual movement, advancing understanding of collective communication dynamics.

Findings

Hive shape affects recruitment rates and decision speed.

Spatial models show tradeoffs between quick information spread and recruitment failure.

Colony-level signal detection is influenced by spatial structure and population dispersal.

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.