Social Organization of Foraging by Honey Bees

这个研究项目将加强我们对蜜蜂群体成员如何合作有效地收集食物的理解。提供花蜜和花粉的花朵通常是一块块的，不同的花丛对蜜蜂的盈利能力也不同，这取决于与蜂巢的距离、花蜜或花粉的丰富程度、花蜜的糖浓度等因素。如果蜂群要有效地采集食物，就必须解决根据不同的盈利程度在不同的花丛中分配觅食者的问题。西利博士之前的研究表明，蚁群的决策是高度分散的。事实上，它似乎是分布在群体中的所有觅食者中，而不是分布在群体的某个监管子集中。目前的调查将阐明这一群体决策过程的几个尚不为人知的方面，例如，不同食物来源的招募是如何根据每种食物来源的盈利能力进行调节的。这项研究还将更深入地研究一个群体如何根据其营养状况调整其对花蜜来源的选择。西利博士将研究一个蜂群是如何保持觅食蜜蜂和食物储存蜜蜂的比例平衡的，这样寻找食物储存蜜蜂的难度就可以作为蜂群营养状况的可靠指标。本研究的总体意义有几个方面。首先，对于基础生物学来说，它提供了一种独特的视角来看待动物社会中进化出来的高级功能组织，它揭示了自然选择产生的一些优雅的机制，这些机制使这些社会能够作为一个连贯的单位运作。其次，它显示了自然选择如何建立了能够执行分布式信息处理来解决问题的动物群体。因此，它证明了动物社会，而不仅仅是生物体的神经系统，提供了如何建立智力的课程。第三，它具有实际意义，因为它极大地加强了我们对蜜蜂群体在农业环境中如何选择接受或拒绝某种特定作物作为食物来源，从而在授粉中发挥好坏作用的理解。

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.