Local behavioral rules sustain the cell allocation pattern in the combs of honey bee colonies (Apis mellifera)

JOURNAL OF THEORETICAL BIOLOGY

卷:336

Article

Montovan, Kathryn J.¹  Karst, Nathaniel²  Jones, Laura E.³  Seeley, Thomas D.⁴ 

[1] Cornell Univ, Ctr Appl Math, Ithaca, NY 14853 USA

[2] Babson Coll, Div Math & Sci, Wellesley, MA 02457 USA

[3] Cornell Univ, Dept Ecol & Evolutionary Biol, Ithaca, NY USA

[4] Cornell Univ, Dept Neurobiol & Behav, Ithaca, NY 14853 USA

关键词: Self-organization;    Discrete time dynamics;    Latin hypercube analysis;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.jtbi.2013.07.010

来源: Elsevier

【 摘 要 】

In the beeswax combs of honey bees, the cells of brood, pollen, and honey have a consistent spatial pattern that is sustained throughout the life of a colony. This spatial pattern is believed to emerge from simple behavioral rules that specify how the queen moves, where foragers deposit honey/pollen and how honey/pollen is consumed from cells. Prior work has shown that a set of such rules can explain the formation of the allocation pattern starting from an empty comb. We show that these rules cannot maintain the pattern once the brood start to vacate their cells, and we propose new, biologically realistic rules that better sustain the observed allocation pattern. We analyze the three resulting models by performing hundreds of simulation runs over many gestational periods and a wide range of parameter values. We develop new metrics for pattern assessment and employ them in analyzing pattern retention over each simulation run. Applied to our simulation results, these metrics show alteration of an accepted model for honey/pollen consumption based on local information can stabilize the cell allocation pattern over time. We also show that adding global information, by biasing the queen's movements towards the center of the comb, expands the parameter regime over which pattern retention occurs. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

【 授权许可】

Free