Biology of Conflict in Honey-Bee Colonies

动物社会内部的互动是合作和冲突的复杂组合。这项研究将研究蜜蜂群体中的个体是如何在群体的某些活动中仍然处于冲突中的，这是一个表现出极端合作程度的社会。这项研究聚焦于蜜蜂社交生活中最大的冲突点：蜂群期间蜂王之间的蜂群划分。在对蜜蜂的数百年观察中，它是第一批描述蜂群和蜂后行为的个体。这项研究特别令人感兴趣的是理解蜜蜂如何决定哪些蜂王和蜂群一起离开，以及产生多少蜂群(蜂王)，以及这些决定是如何从个体的行为中建立起来的，从而导致大规模的群居事件。这项研究将通过在一群高级群居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。它将增加对进化如何塑造动物交流方式的理解，并将通过展示高级群居昆虫的社会性质拓宽我们的视野，因为它们在基因上是截然不同的，这些社会中的个体可能会发生尖锐的冲突，尽管它们经常合作。此外，蜜蜂蜂群的控制仍然是粮食作物产蜜和授粉蜜蜂实际管理中尚未解决的问题之一。这项对蜂群这种令人惊讶的鲜为人知的社会生物学的研究可能因此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.