Biology of Conflict in Honey-Bee Colonies

动物社会中的互动是合作与冲突的复杂混合体。本研究将研究蜜蜂群体中的个体，一个表现出极端合作程度的社会，在群体的某些活动中是如何处于冲突中的。这项研究的重点是蜜蜂社会生活中最大的冲突点：蜂群期间蜂王之间的群体划分。这是数百年来首次对蜜蜂进行观察，描述了蜜蜂个体在蜂群期间和蜂群后的行为。这项研究特别感兴趣的是了解蜜蜂是如何决定哪些蜂王带着蜂群离开，产生多少蜂群（蜂王），以及这些决定是如何从个体的行为中建立起来的，这些决定导致了大规模的、整个群体的事件。这项研究将通过在一群高级社会性昆虫中测试当前进化理论的预测，为社会行为的一般理论做出贡献。它将加深我们对进化如何塑造动物交流方式的理解，并将拓宽我们对高级群居昆虫社会本质的看法，因为它们在基因上是不同的，所以这些社会中的个体可能会发生激烈的冲突，尽管他们经常合作。此外，控制蜜蜂的蜂群仍然是实际管理中未解决的问题之一，用于蜂蜜生产和粮食作物授粉的蜜蜂。这项对蜂群的社会生物学的研究令人惊讶地少，因此可能对养蜂业和农业具有实际意义。

Interactions within animal societies are a complex mix of cooperation and conflict. This study will examine how the individuals in the honey-bee colony, a society exhibiting an extreme degree of cooperation, are nonetheless in conflict during certain of the colony's activities. The study focuses on the point of greatest conflict in honey-bee social life: the division of the colony between queens during swarming. It is among the first in hundreds of years of observations on bees to describe the behaviors of individual bees during swarming and afterswarming. Of special interest in this study is an understanding of how the bees decide which queens leave with swarms and how many swarms (queens) are produced, and how these decisions, resulting large-scale, colony-wide events, are built up from the behavior of individuals. This research will contribute to the general theory of social behavior by testing predictions of current evolutionary theory within a colony of advanced social insects. It will add to understanding of the way in which evolution shapes animal communication, and it will broaden our view of the nature of the societies of the advanced social insects by showing how, because they are genetically distinct, individuals within these societies may sharply conflict, although they so often cooperate. In addition, the control of swarming in honey bees remains one of the unsolved problems in practical management of honey bees for honey production and pollination of food crops. This research into the surprisingly little-studied social biology of swarming may thus have practical implications for the beekeeping industry and agriculture.