Modelling collective foraging by means of individual behaviour rules in honey-bees |
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Authors: | Han de Vries Jacobus C Biesmeijer |
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Institution: | (1) Ethology and Socio-Ecology Group, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80.086, 3508 TB Utrecht, The Netherlands e-mail: J.deVries@bio.uu.nl, Tel.: +31-30-2535403, Fax: +31-30-2521105, NL |
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Abstract: | An individual-oriented model is constructed which simulates the collective foraging behaviour of a colony of honey-bees,
Apis mellifera. Each bee follows the same set of behavioural rules. Each rule consists of a set of conditions followed by the behavioural
act to be performed if the conditions are fulfilled. The set of conditions comprises the state of external information available
to the bee (e.g. the dancing of other bees) and internal information variables (like memorised location of a food source and
homing motivation). The rules are partly observational (i.e. they capture the observable regularities between the present
external information and the individual bee's behaviour), and partly involve hypothesised internal-state variables (e.g. abandoning
tendency and homing motivation), because no observable (physiological) aspect has as yet been detected in the bee which correlates
with changes in the internal motivation. Our aim is to obtain a set of rules that is necessary and sufficient for the generation
of the collective foraging behaviour observed in real bees. We simulated an experiment performed by Seeley et al. in which
a colony of honey-bees chooses between two nectar sources of different profitabilities which are switched at intervals. A
good fit between observed and simulated collective forager patterns was obtained when the model included rules in which the
bees (1) relied on the information acquired from previous flights to a source (e.g. profitability and time of day when the
source was found), (2) used positional information obtained by attending recruitment dances and (3) did not abandon a (temporarily)
deteriorated source too fast or too slowly. The significance of the following issues is discussed: the role of internal and
external information, source profitability, the spatial precision of the dance communication, the ability to search for a
source after the source position has been transmitted, the tendency to abandon a deteriorated source, and the concepts of
scout, recruit, (un)employed forager, and foraging history.
Received: 26 January 1998 / Accepted after revision: 16 May 1998 |
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Keywords: | Honey-bee Collective behavior Collective foraging Communication Individual-oriented model “ It may be that You never can tell with bees ” from Winnie the Pooh by A A Milne (1926) |
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