The mechanism of flight guidance in honeybee swarms: subtle guides or streaker bees?

Schultz, Kevin; Passino, K.M.; Seeley, Thomas D.

doi:10.1242/jeb.018994

Cited by 80 publications

(65 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Knowledgeable workers thus play a key role in allowing the collective exploitation of valuable private information. Key individuals were already predicted to play a major role in certain self-organising processes, such as synchronised movements in large groups (Couzin et al, 2005;Schultz et al, 2008;Sumpter et al, 2008;Conradt et al, 2009;Dyer et al, 2009) and division of labour in social insect colonies (Robson and Traniello, 1999). Our study highlights a new instance of a self-organised biological process in which all individuals do not contribute equally to the collective outcome, i.e.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 72%

“…However, there is accumulating evidence that certain self-organised processes can be disproportionately influenced by key individuals playing the role of effective leaders. This has been mainly studied in synchronised movements and activity shifts by large groups of vertebrates (Couzin et al, 2005;Sumpter et al, 2008;Dyer et al, 2009;Lusseau and Conradt, 2009) and invertebrates (Schultz et al, 2008). In insect societies, such as ant and honeybee colonies, recent studies have also highlighted the key influence of specialised and/or experienced individuals on task performance (Robson and Traniello, 1999;Sendova-Franks et al, 2010), division of labour (Anderson and Ratnieks, 1999;Gordon, 2002) and mass recruitment (Collignon and Detrain, 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Knowledgeable individuals lead collective decisions in ants

Stroeymeyt

Franks

Giurfa

2011

Journal of Experimental Biology

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SUMMARYSelf-organisation underlies many collective processes in large animal groups, where coordinated patterns and activities emerge at the group level from local interactions among its members. Although the importance of key individuals acting as effective leaders has recently been recognised in certain collective processes, it is widely believed that self-organised decisions are evenly shared among all or a subset of individuals acting as decision-makers, unless there are significant conflicts of interests among group members. Here, we show that certain individuals are disproportionately influential in self-organised decisions in a system where all individuals share the same interests: nest site selection by the ant Temnothorax albipennis. Workers that visited a good available nest site prior to emigration (the familiar nest) memorised its location, and later used this memory to navigate efficiently and find that nest faster than through random exploration. Additionally, these workers relied on their private information to expedite individual decisions about the familiar nest. This conferred a bias in favour of familiar nests over novel nests during emigrations. Informed workers were shown to have a significantly greater share in both recruitment and transport to the familiar nest than naïve workers. This suggests that they were the main determinants of the collective preference for familiar nests, and thus contributed greatly to enhance collective performance. Overall, these results indicate that self-organised decisions are not always evenly shared among decision-makers, even in systems where there are no conflicts of interest. Animal groups may instead benefit from well-informed, knowledgeable individuals acting as leaders in decisions. Supplementary material available online at

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 72%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowledgeable individuals lead collective decisions in ants

Stroeymeyt

Franks

Giurfa

2011

Journal of Experimental Biology

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“…So, how can these fewer bees lead the entire swarm toward the new site? After falsifying the "assembly pheromone" assumption [5], there have been at least two likely hypotheses, both of which show that the informed bees provide guidance information to the other bees [6]. One hypothesis is the "subtle bee" hypothesis and the other one is the "streaker bee" hypothesis.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling bee swarming behavior through diffusion adaptation with asymmetric information sharing

Sayed

2012

EURASIP J. Adv. Signal Process.

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Honeybees swarm when they move to a new site for their hive. During the process of swarming, their behavior can be analyzed by classifying them as informed bees or uninformed bees, where the informed bees have some information about the destination while the uninformed bees follow the informed bees. The swarm's movement can be viewed as a network of mobile nodes with asymmetric information exchange about their destination. In these networks, adaptive and mobile agents share information on the fly and adapt their estimates in response to local measurements and data shared with neighbors. Diffusion adaptation is used to model the adaptation process in the presence of asymmetric nodes and noisy data. The simulations indicate that the models are able to emulate the swarming behavior of bees under varied conditions such as a small number of informed bees, sharing of target location, sharing of target direction, and noisy measurements.

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“…These then proceed to burrow and run through the swarm cluster producing the buzz-run signal, which physically dislodges the swarm and forces it into the air (Rittschof and Seeley, 2008). Once in the air, scout bees act as swarm guides, streaking through the swarm cluster in the direction needed to travel in order to lead the group to its new home (Beekman et al, 2006;Greggers et al, 2013;Janson et al, 2005;Latty et al, 2009;Schultz et al, 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moving without a purpose: an experimental study of swarm guidance in the Western honey bee (Apis mellifera Linnaeus)

Makinson

Beekman

2014

Journal of Experimental Biology

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During reproductive swarming, honey bee scouts perform two very important functions. Firstly, they find new nesting locations and return to the swarm cluster to communicate their discoveries. Secondly, once the swarm is ready to depart, informed scout bees act as guides, leading the swarm to its final destination. We have previously hypothesised that the two processes, selecting a new nest site and swarm guidance, are tightly linked in honey bees. When swarms can be laissez faire about where they nest, reaching directional consensus prior to lift off seems unnecessary. If, in contrast, it is essential that the swarm reaches a precise location, either directional consensus must be near unanimous prior to swarm departure or only a select subgroup of the scouts guide the swarm. Here, we tested experimentally whether directional consensus is necessary for the successful guidance of swarms of the Western honey bee Apis mellifera by forcing swarms into the air prior to the completion of the decision-making process. Our results show that swarms were unable to guide themselves prior to the swarm reaching the pre-flight buzzing phase of the decision-making process, even when directional consensus was high. We therefore suggest that not all scouts involved in the decision-making process attempt to guide the swarm.

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The mechanism of flight guidance in honeybee swarms: subtle guides or streaker bees?

Abstract: SUMMARYSupplementary material available online at

Cited by 80 publications

References 22 publications

Knowledgeable individuals lead collective decisions in ants

Knowledgeable individuals lead collective decisions in ants

Modeling bee swarming behavior through diffusion adaptation with asymmetric information sharing

Moving without a purpose: an experimental study of swarm guidance in the Western honey bee (Apis mellifera Linnaeus)

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