Social Organization of Foraging by Honey Bees

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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.