Robustness of collective scenting in the presence of physical obstacles

Abstract

Honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) aggregate around the queen by collectively organizing a communication network to propagate volatile pheromone signals. Our previous study shows that individual bees "scent" to emit pheromones and fan their wings to direct the signal flow, creating an efficient search and aggregation process. In this work, we introduce environmental stressors in the form of physical obstacles that partially block pheromone signals and prevent a wide open path to the queen. We employ machine learning methods to extract data from the experimental recordings, and show that in the presence of an obstacle that blocks most of the path to the queen, the bees need more time but can still effectively employ the collective scenting strategy to overcome the obstacle and aggregate around the queen. Further, we increase the complexity of the environment by presenting the bees with a maze to navigate to the queen. The bees require more time and exploration to form a more populated communication network. Overall, we show that given volatile pheromone signals and only local communication, the bees can collectively solve the swarming process in a complex unstructured environment with physical obstacles.

Physical Obstacles Constrain Behavioral Parameter Space of Successful Localization in Honey Bee Swarms

“…For each environmental condition, we report results for three experiments with similar number of worker bees ranging from 240 to 380. Five experiments per condition were presented in Nguyen et al (2021a); we present three per condition here for consistency in number of bees in the simulation ( N = 300).…”

“…We followed methods described in detail in Nguyen et al (2021b) for experiments without obstacle and in Nguyen et al (2021a) with obstacle. As this paper mainly focuses on modeling, we briefly summarize the methods.…”

“…1A,C). Per the experiments in Nguyen et al (2021a), we expect to observe the robustness of the bee communication system in the more complex environment. More importantly, by modeling, we aim to gain insights into how the behavioral parameter space responds to the presence of obstacle.…”

“…This collective scenting strategy creates an effective communication network for localization and aggregation in honey bee swarms (Nguyen et al, 2021b). Nguyen et al (2021a) experimentally showed the robustness of collective scenting in the presence of obstacles that partially block pheromone flow and the open path to the queen. Compared to a simple environment without any obstacle, the more complex environment requires more time to explore and navigate.…”

“…Nguyen et al (2021a) experimentally showed the robustness of collective scenting in the presence of obstacles that partially block pheromone flow and the open path to the queen. Compared to a simple environment without any obstacle, the more complex environment requires more time to explore and navigate.…”