In late spring and early summer, a honey bee colony becomes overcrowded. Then, half of the swarm rushes off with the old queen to setup a colony elsewhere and several hundred of its oldest bees will look for potential new nest sites. These scout bees come back to the hive and advertise new homes doing the waggle dance. Finally, the hive democratically selects a new nest site.
In real house-hunting honeybees it is crucial for the swarm to reach consensus as quick as possible while choosing the best alternative available. In a mathematical model with $N$ alternative potential new nest sites among which one has higher quality compared with the other $N-1$ options, we found that the relative time invested by swarm members in individual discovery and in signaling behaviors (expressed as ratio $r$ in the figure below) is one of the key parameters that determines decision performance.
Plot displaying areas of decision-deadlock (A), possible deadlock-breaking (B) and guaranteed deadlock-breaking (C) depending on option quality, v, and ratio of interaction and spontaneous transitions of the bee swarm.
In another study, we could also observe several parallels between decision making in house-hunting honeybees and psychophysical laws that can be found in human decision making. This suggests that these laws arise from fundamental mechanisms of information processing and decision making.
Representative publication:
