Social networks predict the life and death of honey bees

Abstract

In complex societies, individuals’ roles are reflected by interactions with other conspecifics. Honey bees (Apis mellifera) generally change tasks as they age, but developmental trajectories of individuals can vary drastically due to physiological and environmental factors. We introduce a succinct descriptor of an individual’s social network that can be obtained without interfering with the colony. This ‘network age’ accurately predicts task allocation, survival, activity patterns, and future behavior. We analyze developmental trajectories of multiple cohorts of individuals in a natural setting and identify distinct developmental pathways and critical life changes. Our findings suggest a high stability in task allocation on an individual level. We show that our method is versatile and can extract different properties from social networks, opening up a broad range of future studies. Our approach highlights the relationship of social interactions and individual traits, and provides a scalable technique for understanding how complex social systems function.

The dominant axes of lifetime behavioral variation in honey bees

“…The differences described by life-PCA component 2 agree with recent work which found differences among individual bees in developmental trajectories, as described in the age at which they change interactions patterns and nest substrate usage (Wild et al, 2021). Moreover, Wild et al (2021) found that developmental trajectories began to significantly diverge at approximately six-days of age.…”

“…Using the BeesBook system, the raw image data were processed to detect and decode the individually marked bees (Boenisch et al, 2018;Wild et al, 2018Wild et al, , 2021. For each individual, its tag id, id detection confidence, position, and orientation were tracked over time, and stored in a PostgreSQL database.…”

“…In colonies of the honey bee Apis mellifera individuals perform different tasks according to multiple factors, including developmental state, genetics, and behavioral feedback mediated by social interactions (Robinson, 2002;Huang et al, 1994;Beshers and Fewell, 2001;Johnson, 2008b;Wild et al, 2021). This gives rise to a general tendency for young bees to care for brood in the center of the nest, middle-age bees to perform various tasks throughout the nest, and old bees to forage outside and advertise food sites with waggle dances on the dance floor (Seeley, 1982).…”

“…However, we lack a general understanding of how behavioral diversity (which may, of course, be related to genetic diversity), and the corresponding individual differences contribute to the flexibility and robustness of honey bee colonies (Jeanson and Weidenmüller, 2014). Indeed, task allocation is known to be flexible, with workers reallocating themselves when necessary, thus highlighting the need to use multiple factors in order to describe the behavior of individual bees (Seeley, 1989b;Robinson, 1992;Huang and Robinson, 1996;Schulz et al, 1998;Johnson, 2003;Wild et al, 2021).…”

Social capital: an independent dimension of healthy ageing

“…Throughout ontogenesis, worker ants or bees change from one caste to another 21 . This is associated with age-related cognitive decline 22 and changes in their social capital; they no longer interact with the same individuals [23][24][25] .…”