[ad_1]
The bee colonies are much more of a beehive of worker bees doing their jobs without thinking as the queen bee looms over them.
To some extent, they are their complex organism. But they are also living societies, made up of individuals. Worker bees are not mere drones, rather they have a stronger individual will than we might imagine.
By understanding these bees, we may simply improve our understanding of another species, including ourselves.
Buzz Buzz – A new study published Monday on Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals the details of the complex social interactions between honey bees (Apis mellifera). The research focuses on trophylaxis, which includes not only the exchange of food between bees, but also other forms of face-to-face communication.
Researchers studied how bees exhibited individual behavior during social interactions, using some benchmarks to determine the individuality of bees.
“We looked at measures of how often bees interacted,” says Nigel Goldenfeld, study co-author and Professor of Advanced Study in Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Reverse.
To record these social interactions, the researchers first bar-coded each bee. (Yes, just like you would for an item in the grocery store.) They then used high-resolution video cameras to capture footage of bee pairs.
Bee interactions, such as those observed among humans, appear to follow a heavy-tailed distribution pattern, suggesting a considerable degree of variation in social interactions and individual behavior.
Goldenfeld explains the heavy-tail distribution this way: “If you measure the height of students in a classroom, they could average 5 feet plus or minus 3 inches, with most students within a few inches of the average. heavy-tailed do not have such an obvious mean. “
“If heights had a heavy tail distribution, you could have most students around 5 feet, some around 6 feet, some around 7 feet, and an even smaller number around 12 feet,” he says.
“But this [distribution] it happens for many quantities that you can measure, such as people’s wealth or income, “says Goldenfeld. Or, as in this case, social interactions.
According to the researchers’ analysis, some bees showed higher levels of food sharing and social interactions than others.
“Just like humans, some bees participate in more interactions than others,” says Goldenfeld.
Just like us? – This connection proved too curious to resist these researchers. After observing honey bees, scientists realized that the findings could apply to humans as well. Then, the scientists compared the two species.
“Bees are social insects and it’s relatively easy to study large bee populations, run multiple replicates of the experiments, and then get accurate statistics,” says Goldenfeld. “Only after getting our results did we confront humans, really just out of curiosity.”
To do this, Goldenfeld and his colleagues used the Gini coefficient – a measure commonly used to determine income inequality, but which can also measure inequality between social interactions – to measure differences in the behavior of individuals and between bees. than among humans.
“For humans, you could measure this by how many times they meet someone for coffee each week. For bees, you can measure this by how many other bees interact within a certain time,” Goldenfeld says.
They found that honey bees have a Gini coefficient of between 0.2 and 0.3, which means that there is a fair degree of individual behavior in the social interactions of bees.
By comparing bees to humans, scientists found that some bees, like some humans, interact more and for longer periods, making them more social than their peers.
“We were really impressed that the data was the same,” says Goldenfeld.
It is important to note that the similarities have a limit. The bees in this study did not show the same variation in social interactions as humans, who had a higher Gini coefficient in the range of 0.3 to 0.5.
“Therefore, although individual bees are distinct, they are not as different from each other as humans are,” say the study authors.
But the results seen here could look very different in a genetically diverse bee population. And the researchers believe the findings eventually apply to other social species, including humans.
“The fact that we’ve discovered these commonalities and explained them theoretically is important for human interactions,” says Goldenfeld. “It means we don’t need to try to explain universal behavior using ideas and behavioral patterns that are specifically dependent on the special characteristics of human societies.”
Abstract: The duration of interaction events in a society is a fundamental measure of its collective nature and potentially reflects the variability in individual behavior. Here we performed a high-throughput measurement of trophylaxis and the duration of face-to-face events experienced by a colony of honey bees over their entire lifetime. The distribution of interaction time is heavy, as previously reported for human face-to-face interactions. We developed a theory of pair interactions that takes into account individual variability and predicts scaling behavior for existing human and bee data sets. The individual variability of worker bees was non-zero but lower than that of humans, probably reflecting their greater genetic relatedness. Our work shows how individual differences can lead to universal behavioral patterns that transcend species and specific mechanisms for social interactions.
Source link
