Social Organization of Foraging by Honey Bees

蜜蜂觅食的社会组织

• 批准号: 8916006
• 负责人: Thomas Seeley
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Cornell University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1990
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1990-05-15 至 1993-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=8916006&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Social; Organization; Foraging; Honey; Bees

This research project will strengthen our understanding of how the members of a honey-bee colony work together to efficiently gather their food. The flowers that provide the nectar and pollen generally occur in patches, and the different flower patches vary in their profitability to the bees depending on such factors as distance from the hive, abundance of nectar or pollen, sugar concentration of the nectar, and so forth. If the colony is to gather its food efficiently, it must solve the problem of allocating its foragers among the different flower patches in accordance with their different degrees of profitability. Dr. Seeley's prior work has shown that the colony's decision- making is highly decentralized. Indeed, it seems that it is distributed among all of the foragers in the colony rather than in some supervisory subset of the colony. The present investigations will elucidate several still-unknown aspects of this group decision-making process, such as exactly how the recruitment to different food sources is regulated in relation to the profitability of each food source. This research will also examine more deeply how a colony adjusts its choosiness among nectar sources in relation to its nutritional status. Dr. Seeley will investigate how a colony keeps the ratio of forager bees and food-storer bees in balance so that the difficulty of finding a food-storer bee serves as a reliable indicator of the colony's nutritional status. The general significance of this research has several dimensions. First, for basic biology, it provides a unique view of the high level of functional organization that has evolved in animal societies, and it reveals some of the elegant devices produced by natural selection that enable these societies to function as coherent units. Second, it shows how natural selection has built animal groups capable of performing distributed information- processing to solve problems. Hence it is demonstrating that animal societies, not just the nervous systems of organisms, offer lessons in how to build intelligence. And third, it has practical implications in that it greatly strengthens our understanding of how honey-bee colonies in agricultural settings choose to accept or reject a given crop as a food source and hence function well or poorly in pollination.

这项研究项目将加强我们对如何 蜜蜂群体的成员一起工作， 收集食物。 提供花蜜的花朵 花粉通常出现在斑块中，不同的花 这些斑块对蜜蜂的盈利能力各不相同， 与蜂巢的距离花蜜或花粉的丰富程度 花蜜中的糖分浓度等等。 如果殖民地 为了有效地收集食物，它必须解决 在不同的花丛中分配觅食， 根据其盈利能力的不同程度。 塞利博士先前的研究表明殖民地的决定- 制作是高度分散的。 事实上， 分布在殖民地的所有觅食蚁中 在殖民地的某个监管子集中。 本 调查将阐明几个仍然未知的方面， 这一群体决策过程，例如 对不同食物来源的招募进行了管制， 每种食物来源的利润。 这项研究也将 更深入地研究一个殖民地如何调整它的选择性， 花蜜来源与其营养状况有关。 塞利医生 将研究蜂群如何保持觅食蜂的比例， 食物储存蜜蜂的平衡，使寻找一个 食物储存蜜蜂作为一个可靠的指标，殖民地的 营养状况 这项研究的一般意义有几个方面。 首先，对于基础生物学，它提供了一个独特的观点， 动物进化出的功能组织水平 社会，它揭示了一些优雅的设备所产生的 自然选择使这些社会能够 相干单位 第二，它展示了自然选择是如何 动物群体能够执行分布式信息- 处理来解决问题。 因此，它表明， 动物社会，不仅仅是生物体的神经系统， 提供如何构建智能的课程。 第三， 实际意义在于它大大加强了我们的 了解农业环境中的蜂群 选择接受或拒绝特定作物作为食物来源， 因此在授粉中起着很好或很差作用。