Costs of Environmental Fluctuations and Benefits of Dynamic Decentralized Foraging Decisions in Honey Bees

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Abstract
Honey bees show the impressive ability to choose collectively (through swarm intelligence) between nectar sources of different quality by selecting the energetically optimal one. We here present results from a multi-agent simulation of a cohort of foraging bees. The model, which is built on proximate individual mechanisms, leads to interesting results on the (global) colony level. The simulation allows us to investigate collective foraging decisions in a variety of experimental setups that can be reproduced experimentally with real bees. Because our model allows us to project the daily net honey gain of the simulated honey bee colony, it enables us to explore the economic results of foraging decisions, even in a fluctuating environment. We used the model to investigate the dynamics and efficiency of a bee colony’s decentralized decision system in terms of minimizing the potential cost of lost nectar income due to changes in food quality in a fluctuating environment.